Lords of Chaos, from Spun/Spawndirector Jonas Akerlund, opened in limited release this past weekend. It depicts one of my favorite obscure, lurid corners of music history, the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 90s, which eventually dissolved into murder, suicide, Satanism, and arson (which is paradoxically also the only reason it was ever known).

Lords of Chaos is the first scripted film about the saga, but far from the first film to tell it. As someone who can’t get enough of this story, Akerlund’s film felt like both a novel take on the material and true to it. In one invented scene, Euronymous (played by Rory Culkin), guitarist of Mayhem and sort of the ringleader of the scene, meets Varg Vikernes (played by Emory Cohen), the eventual singer of Burzem. Euronymous walks up to Vikernes, points to a Scorpions patch on his jacket, and says, simply and condescendingly, “Scorpions.”

It’s a great scene, that seems to succinctly capture the kind of dick measuring/purity testing that used to characterize music scenes, and still characterizes so many fandoms. Euronymous shames Vikernes just by reading the patch, that Vikernes knows he’s supposed to be ashamed makes it so much worse. But speaking to Akerlund recently, he revealed that as originally shot, the scene didn’t involve the Scorpions at all.

“We made a point out of their relationship starting in a weird way, and also [wanted to convey] how affected Varg was by Euronymous and his black circle,” Akerlund explains. “It was actually meant to be shot with a Dr. Feelgood, Mötley Crüe’s patch.”

Akerlund goes on to note that it just wasn’t going to happen: “And then one of my producers said, ‘You have to clear it. It’s a close-up, we have to clear it.’ And Nikki Sixx said no. He actually said, ‘No way.’ We sent him the scene, and I was like, ‘Come on, dude, we’re not making fun of you. These guys were fucked up and they didn’t like anything, especially American glam rock.’ But he couldn’t take it. Nikki Sixx was worried that his brand was gonna be damaged.”

Akerland went to say that “as a back up, we [shot it with a Scorpions patch], which is not really correct, actually, because Scorpions, at that time, was not cheesy. If you were metal back then, Scorpions was cool. All the 70s stuff and early 80s stuff with Scorpions still, to this day, is fucking awesome. I feel a little bad. Doing that, it should really be Mötley Crüe, or any of the American acts from that time. That’s the biggest contrast. Norwegian black metal and the Sunset Strip glam rock. You couldn’t be further away from each other.”

Incredible that the guy who has allowed his music to be used in everything from Ford Fairlane to Leisure Suit Larry to Juggalo Championship Wrestling Vol. 2 was worried that being ridiculed by Satanic arsonists in an invented scene for a film about black metal would damage his brand. This is also a band that described putting their penises in a breakfast burrito as an alternative to showering. Uproxx has reached out to representatives for Mötley Crüe for comment. We will update if we hear back.

Incidentally, the film adaptation of The Dirt, one of my other all-time favorite music stories (featuring the aforementioned breakfast burrito story), about Motley Crue, is set to hit Netflix March 22nd. It was directed by Jeff Tremaine of Jackass and (unfortunately) stars Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy Lee. Which I guess means that we’re stuck with Machine Gun Kelly for a little longer. He must have an incredible agent.

With the TV adaptation of Dirty John wrapping up on Bravo and adaptations of Gladiator (for FX) as well asDr. Death and Business Wars, Wondery is hoping to build on their successes with another new true crime podcast miniseries, Over My Dead Body, covering the unsolved case of a respected law professor who was murdered in his driveway in Tallahassee in 2014. It follows a similar blueprint as the others, teaming a seasoned reporter — in this case Matt Shaer, who has written features for GQ and the New York Times — with Wondery’s production team.

Wondery is sort of an early adopter in giving podcasts the same kind of promotion as TV series and movies, buying billboards and hosting listening premieres (the LA listening premiere for Dr. Death provided the audience with eye masks while the podcast played over the screening room’s speakers), which seems to have paid off in all the upcoming adaptations of its shows. OMDB is similar to Dr. Death — which was reported by award-winning medical journalist Laura Beil — in hiring a respected print journalist to do the reporting and hosting while using Wondery’s in-house team of producers and audio engineers to create the sound and add production value.

“This would’ve been a magazine article and it had been approved as a magazine article, but ultimately, there was so much to it,” Shaer told Uproxx. “I had a friend, Eric Benson, who co-reported this with me, and we’d wanted to do a podcast for a while. Eric covers different aspects of the criminal justice system. When we started talking about this one, it was obvious that it compared to a lot of other cases that we’d both written about, there was a lot here and there was enough to spool it out over six episodes.”

The case begins with the story of a courtship and then a divorce, between Dan Markel and Wendi Adelson, two Jewish attorneys, before spiraling into a murder mystery, with connections to both Orthodox rabbis in New York (who Shaer had previously written about for GQ), and Latin gangsters in Miami. “The case was unusual on a lot of levels, but one was that the victim was pretty high profile in the legal academia world,” Shaer says. “Without spoiling anything, I guess suffice to say that what made it additionally fascinating was that it did bring together two radically different worlds in a really tragic way.”

The show is compelling just as an autopsy of a doomed relationship even before it gets to the murder, with twists that are seemingly part of the Wondery house style. Like all Wondery shows, it lives right on the edge of too muchness — too much music, too many sound effects, too busy a soundscape — but as Shaer says, the style seems to fit the story in this case, which he compares to American Crime Story or Fargo on FX.

Over My Dead Body releases its fourth episode this week. I spoke to Matt Shaer by phone.

—

What made you want to do [this story] as a podcast?

Look, I think that there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there, right? There are a lot of true crime television shows. I think that part of what sets this particular story apart is that there are so many different characters involved in this case from so many different types of backgrounds. They were all sucked into this murder investigation that started around 2014 and really gained steam in 2016. I think that there’s an inherent interest too in being able to create something that’s about a relationship as well as a murder. The podcast is specifically structured so that someone doesn’t even die until two hours in.

That was actually one of my other questions — I think it’s like an episode and a half before you even get to the murder. At first, it feels like a story about why a marriage didn’t work, and I was actually just kind of enjoying it on that level before you got to the murder.

I’ll tell you the truth. When Eric and I, we finished a bunch of our reporting and we were getting an outline for the first draft for how we envisioned the whole series going, we had more or less started right with the murder. We started with that, and the investigation immediately lurching into gear. We worked with these producers, Wondery, specifically Marshall Lewy and George Lavender, and they had the idea that, “All right, what if we don’t do that? What if we hold back and make it about the relationship first?” The idea being that people would care about the two people at the center of the investigation more than they would if we just dove right into it. I think that also Wondery’s done some really interesting similar stuff — Dirty John, etc, where you’re kept in the dark for a long time. There’s something to be said for that. It’s interesting to be able to play with structure like that, which you can’t always do with a magazine article but you can with a podcast.

Had you listened to a lot of podcasts before you started working on this one?

No. I mean, yes, I listened to the big ones. I listened to S-Town and I listened to Serial. I listened to all the seasons of Serial and In the Dark, which I really loved, but I watch a ton as well. My unwinding reading is crime novels ranging from the really trashy to the mildly high brow, and I also watch a lot of documentaries about crime.

The way that Wondery works is that their podcasts are really, although it’s in audio form, they are really cinematic in some ways, right? I think that being an aficionado of detective novels and crime TV helped to a large degree. But yeah, as we’ve been winding down our own, I’ve started to listen to more podcasts. I think you can start to see that people are starting to play around with the true crime podcast form. Even though this medium’s been around for a few years, people have done the true crime thing in the straightforward way over and over again, right? People will still make the straightforward ones, but I think it’s really interesting when people start to mess around with how a true crime podcast sounds, how the structure should work, and which act the dead body appears in. I feel like that is something that is getting a lot more thought in terms of approach, which is cool.

Wondery has a very specific house style in terms of the soundscape and the way it should sound. How close was your idea of what it should sound like? How did that fit in with Wondery’s house style?

Well, yeah, look, you can listen to a Wondery podcast and know more or less what you’re gonna get, right? That’s what Hernan and Marshall have set out to do, and they’ve been largely successful. So I knew that that was gonna be how [our] podcast was shaped. I wasn’t under the illusion that it wasn’t gonna have music or sound effects or anything like that.

I think we compromised in some ways and in some ways I learned to appreciate how those techniques can really bring a story to life. Obviously, it resonates, right? I have my own theories about why, but I think obviously it does. I think that maybe it’s a matter of people know what they’re gonna get. They don’t know what the story’s gonna be, but it’s like watching those… What’s the series, they did the OJ Simpson and they did the Versace one?

American Crime Story.

Yeah, exactly. That’s similar, right? They’re different cases but tonally, there’s a relationship between the shows. I think that’s what’s happening with Wondery.

It’s funny. That seems to be a common theme where as writers, I think we envision the story more minimalist, and Wondery does a good job of hiring good reporters and then it seems like there is an interesting compromise there that goes on because their house style is very immersive.

Yeah, it’s very immersive. They worked with the Globe Spotlight team, right? So Wondery has been really impressive journalistically. I think it’s also coming from a writer’s background. If you only are used to writing in print and you’re used to creating atmosphere or suspense through words and not having the aid of audio cues and music and so on, it can be daunting. Wondery in my mind has never gone too far with any of its podcasts in terms of that. I think there is a stage where you could go too far with sound effects and so on at the risk of journalism, but I never felt like that with Over My Dead Body. But also, this story in a weird way is a really good match for the Wondery tone. It’s just a really over the top story. It’s so strange, and there’s so many weird characters in it. What happened is so tragic but also just bizarre that it kind of makes sense in a Wondery tone, just as it would weirdly make sense in…

American Crime Story?

Right. So I think when we were writing it, we were really thinking about [that and] Fargo the TV show. The TV show does a really good job of… Obviously, that’s fiction, not non-fiction, but it does do a really good job at balancing absurd humor with a compelling crime story, and so we were thinking something similar to that. That was what Eric and I would always talk about when we were mapping everything out.

It seems like there’s a lot of specifically Jewish elements to the story. Is that a particular area of expertise for you?

It’s so funny that that happened. I started writing magazine stories in 2010. I am half-Jewish, but as my Jewish grandmother would say, not on the right side. My dad was Jewish, not my mom. I wasn’t raised Jewish, but when I first started doing magazine articles, I was living in Brooklyn at the time and I was writing for New York Magazine and Harper’s. I ended up doing just a weirdly large amount of stories about the Orthodox world. It just kind of happened and I think often what happens with magazine writers is you get pigeonholed pretty quickly, right? I had tried my best to break out of that. I did those stories when it happened.

It’s funny but with the Markel case, we didn’t fully realize going how Jewish Dan was. I knew he was Jewish, but I didn’t know until we started talking to his friends how seriously he took his Judaism, so I knew that there was gonna be an aspect where the Prodfather and some of the kidnapping rabbis would be involved, but I didn’t know that we would get it as much from Dan’s family. I think it is interesting. I’ve been trying to break free of writing about that for so long and then made a whole podcast about it.

It’s part of that interesting mix of cultures that happens in Florida too, right?

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big part of what makes a case so fascinating. You have extremely wealthy lawyers, people who are living a relatively privileged life. You have Jewish dentists, doctors and so on, and then without spoiling too much, what ultimately happened was a weird association between the criminal underworld in Miami and Tallahassee high society, for lack of a better term. The clash, especially in the later episodes, is really interesting to hear from an audio perspective, but yeah.

On that note, are there any special challenges to reporting a story where so many of the people involved are lawyers?

Yeah, the constant fear of getting sued, but yeah, people are really careful, right? If you’re a lawyer, you know what it means to speak out. I would also add that this is an open criminal case, right? That makes it unusual as well because people who are choosing to comment on it and choosing to go on the record are doing it knowing that it is open in a major way. So, that makes it really unique. I think that there were a lot of people who said no. We got lucky that some people did say yes to us, including people that we had been really wishing would come on, but yeah, that’s a challenge. I think we were able to wring, especially in the first two to three episodes,a lot of drama out of the legal battle that was happening during the divorce and get lawyer friends to weigh in on how that was all going down. But yeah, it’s a challenge.

If this is a magazine story, people could’ve gone on background much more freely, right? It’s the reality of podcasting that you always have to have a mic in someone’s face if you want to get good tape.

On that note, when you’re reporting a story that’s about a murder and it’s open, do you ever worry about your own safety? Did you have to take any precautions there?

Let me think how I’m gonna answer that. No, I did not worry about my own safety. I think that we were always really careful about not going too far both in the narration and in our own reporting, so we were careful, but yeah, look, it’s something we’ve thought about obviously. You also think about if a case has not yet gone to trial, how could this impact the course of the investigation, that kind of thing.

So far a lot of the true crime reporting on podcasts has seemed pretty ethically well done, but it seems like there’s potential for someone to come along and, you know, fuck it up for everyone. Is that a thing that you worry about?

Well, I obviously worry about being really careful. One thing that we thought about a lot, I’ve been following the criticism of the Ted Bundy Tapes, the Netflix documentary, and a big part of that was the focus was on the killer and not the victims. So I think that one of the most important things we did starting out was try to get the victims’ parents to speak to us and to have their permission and also have their voice. In doing so, Dan comes back quite a bit in the last episode as do his parents and they’re big in the first two episodes. One thing that we really thought about was it’s a person, right, so you have to tell their story and you have to allow people to get to know them. It can’t just be about the murder itself.

I think in terms of the ethics of it, it’s something that people have been struggling with as long as they’ve been making documentaries or writing about crime at all. I think that people go into it for different reasons. I don’t want to say that we had lots of different motives in wanting to make the podcast, but one is certainly that this case is a little bit stalled out or a lot stalled out, and there is a case to be made that with enough media attention, that might change. Knock on wood. We hope.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read his archive of reviews here.

Watching High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh’s new movie for Netflix, it’s hard to escape the sense that it’s somehow more than a movie. Whereas so many direct-to-streaming titles have the feeling of a lark, some kind of one-off experiment that’s either a worthy failure or charmingly ephemeral, Bird feels almost like a pilot for a future prestige TV series, a proof-of-concept for future films. Perhaps Soderbergh’s most impressive quality is his ability to create movies that feel like entire movements, art that seems to announce “this is what we’re doing now.”

Working from a script by Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, André Holland (also previously of Moonlight) plays sports agent Ray Burke, a kind-of thinking man’s Arli$$, or The Rock from Ballers but with fewer pool parties. The whole thing feels like Professor Soderbergh took all the sports agent shows that came before and returned them covered in red pen. Then he did a quick rewrite. “Here’s where I think you were going with this” — a Michelin starred restaurant’s riff on the chili dog.

Ray Burke represents the number one draft pick, Erick Scott (played by Melvin Gregg), who should be rolling in dough right now except that the NBA is in the midst of a lockout. The owners and the player’s association can’t agree on TV points and revenue sharing, so in the meantime everyone’s financial future is on hold. In an early scene, Burke tells Scott why he got bamboozled when he took a short term loan, only to have his own credit card subsequently declined by the fancy restaurant. Back at the office, Burke’s boss, played by Zachary Quinto, has to explain why they shut off Burke’s corporate card. Probably the hardest part of High Flying Bird to swallow is the idea that the big sports agency is tightening belts, but okay sure.

Especially in the early scenes, the dialogue is fast and almost scatty, like streetwear David Mamet. With a movie as talky as High Flying Bird it’s good to have a mesmerizing talker like André Holland as the lead. He’s the rare actor that can say one thing with his mouth and another with his eyes. Meanwhile, Zazie Beets plays Burke’s ambitious ex-assistant, Sam, with a humanistic ruthlessness, somehow both languid and calculating. She’s great.

Much of the film takes place in large, well-lit rooms or in tracking shots in the streets of Manhattan. So many movies are set in New York, but High Flying Bird actually evokes being there in a way most others don’t. I hadn’t known Soderbergh shot it all on an iPhone until I started reading about it afterwards, but in retrospect the city scenes are where it most shows. The iPhone seems to have allowed him to shoot on the streets without the kind of blocking and crowd control that a traditional film shoot would normally require.

Soderbergh’s use of interviews with NBA players talking about their rookie seasons bookend the scripted scenes, in effect mixing documentary and fiction, and adding some kineticism to the largely talky action. This approach sounds a lot like what Soderbergh allegedly had in mind for Moneyball, before then-Sony head Amy Pascal took him off the project three days before it was set to start filming. Soderbergh has enough confidence in his audience that he’s not worried about losing them with brief digressions into non-fiction, and trusts them enough to make the thematic connection. It’s an open-source kind of storytelling — weaving McRaney’s fictional story around the aspects of real life that inspired it. Maybe Pascal was right to think the approach was too fresh for the average moviegoer in 2009, but as art, as entertainment, for a reasonably sophisticated audience, in 2019; it works.

That High Flying Bird feels so much like the start of something is also its weakness in some ways. It introduces us to a style and a world that it feels like we’re going to live in for a while, and knowing that it’s just going to end when the credits roll is a kind of letdown, even before it actually happens. Soderbergh is taking his time, giving each scene time to come to a simmer, and he’s an enormously patient filmmaker, which makes High Flying Bird‘s scenes mesmerizing, but also a little frustrating. At times you want to shout Hurry up, man, the movie is going to end soon!, even as you try to savor a particularly chewy line delivered by Holland, Beetz, or Bill Duke (!!!), who shows up as the sagely old New York City basketball coach.

Regarding Soderbergh’s much-publicized retirement from movies and infatuation with premium television shows: High Flying Bird feels more like prestige TV than it does a movie. Its biggest drawback is that it isn’t; it feels like a pilot that isn’t. Which makes this a strange kind of a critique. Hey, man, cool movie, but how come there isn’t more?

‘High Flying Bird’ is currently streaming on Netflix. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read his archive of reviews here.

This was a very exciting week on Top Chef, as last week we learned in the upcoming preview that the chefs would be tasked with “celebrating the legacy of Muhammad Ali through your dishes.” And I, for one, was dying to know how one would honor a boxing legend and civil rights hero through a crudo and/or ceviche. Can one win a congressional medallion of honor posthumously? (The medallion is made of veal and covered in a mustard-cream sauce).

But before that could go down, there was a quickfire challenge, based on another Kentucky legend: you guessed it, Colonel Sanders! Because what better way to honor Muhammad Ali than to make him share an episode with a guy who George Wallace once considered naming his running mate during his segregationist campaign for president in 1968? (That’s a fun fact for you.) Actually, no one knows whether Colonel Sanders was all that racist (despite dressing like a southern dandy and growing up in the Jim Crow era), though Papa John certainly tried to claim he was as a deflecting maneuver. Anyway, Muhammad Ali, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Bourbon… what other Kentucky things can Top Chef base a challenge on? All I know is that if there isn’t a Hunter S. Thompson or Jennifer Lawrence challenge I’m going to be flipping over tables.

In the KFC challenge, the contestants had to make fried chicken, but they were only allowed to use the herbs and spices that they could identify in a blind taste test — always one of Top Chef‘s best recurring challenges. Then they had 30 minutes to use their herbs and spices on some fried chicken. I think we can all agree that 30 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to butcher, bread, fry, and serve fried chicken. A couple of them even talked about their “brine.” Brine? You have 30 minutes. You can’t brine in 30 minutes, at best it’s going to be a dip.

Oh and almost all of them used the deep fryer. Laaaaaame. Half of fried chicken is getting the oil type and temperature right. If you’re all just going to use the same giant vats of vegetable oil there’s not much to differentiate you. Solid fats all day.

Then in the Muhammad Ali challenge, everyone was given a particular fight, and tasked with creating a dish based on that fight, to fit each course. Which was kind of disappointing, because it was more like “here’s an African dessert to represent the Rumble In The Jungle” instead of “here is why I believe this poached snapper with harissa aioli best represents the legacy of famed boxing hero Muhammad Ali.”

Also, the chefs all received information packets on the fight they were cooking for. Which just meant that each presentation turned into a fifth-grade book report on some Muhammad Ali facts they’d just read. “In conclusion, Muhammad Ali is a man of contrasts, just like this Southeast Asian inspired cured halibut…”

It would’ve been so much better if the chefs just had to work from memory and then got fact-checked during their presentations. “Jeff, I thought your pork belly was a little under-rendered, and also, Muhammad Ali never showed up overweight for his fight against a white bartender from Cleveland, you’re thinking of The Great White Hype, starring Peter Berg and Damon Wayans.”

Then the elimination was yet another heartbreak for a former favorite. It seems the best way to jinx yourself this season is to win a challenge.

Rankings

1. (+1) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

It’s taken him long enough, but Eric has finally turned into the favorite I thought he was in the first few episodes. Even so, he still landed in the bottom three in the fried chicken challenge (he named seven spices correctly, third place), despite winning last week’s challenge with a delicious-looking… you guessed it, fried chicken wing. I’m telling you, this season is weird as hell.

Luckily he got to do a dish for the Rumble In The Jungle, for which he cooked Fufu dumplings and red stew. I’ve never had those things but that’s probably the point: Tom can’t get pedantic about how al dente pasta should be or the proper looseness of risotto if you cook him something way outside his comfort zone. Knowing your brand is half of Top Chef and pretty much everyone could learn from Eric. He’s looking like a fufufavorite going into the home stretch.

Sara constantly says that she’s the best at things — chicken, biscuits, bourbon, throwing ragers — and this week she actually backed it up. First, she named 12 herbs and spices (first place) and then used them to spice a winning fried chicken dish. You’d think a person would take that as a sign and build on her brand, but instead she loudly and inexplicably declared her desire not to cook any more Kentucky food in the Muhammad Ali challenge. Luckily they ended up having to draw straws and Sara lost and had to take the Kentucky fight anyway, which she ended up almost winning (“I was reading that he was fast as lightning, so I made a dish called thunder and lightning”).

So even though Sara tried to pull another bonehead move — or pulling a boxed waffle, as I now like to call it — the universe intervened. It’s fitting that Sara landed in the top two of a Muhammad Ali challenge though because no other competitor so fully embodies the spirit of loudly declaring “I am the greatest!”

I have thus given her the new nickname of Kanye. At the very least, Sara is by far the most nicknameable contestant.

Kelsey named 11 herbs and spices correctly, second best behind Sara, and proceeded to make fried chicken and pickles, another on-brand choice for the contestant who most loves salt (I’ve nicknamed her Bambi because she loves a salt lick). Sadly, she tried to use the damn deep fryer like everyone else and ended up with undercooked chicken and had to serve Art Smith a tiny sliver of fried chicken skin. If she hadn’t admitted that she served it that way because it was raw she would’ve had a much better chance.

For one thing, no one likes to hear the phrase “raw” while they’re eating chicken, and for another she could’ve just served up some delicious crunchy skin and called it “KFC, Cartman style” or something. If only Kelsey had Adrienne’s gift for branding.

After that, Kelsey served “unanimous bread pudding with corn three ways” in the elimination challenge, which the judges seemed to have some valid criticisms of, right up until Kelsey started crying because she missed her son at Judges’ Table. Is this the second challenge decided by weaponized white woman tears or the third? Jk, jk, that bread pudding looked delicious, but seriously, the crying chef has never gone home this season.

Justin distinguished himself early in this week’s episode as the only contestant who couldn’t identify salt. In Justin’s defense, he was probably vaping some cotton candy-flavored CBD right before that so his palate was a little muddled.

Lacking salt, Justin had to use soy and shoyu for flavor, which led him to a Japanese fried chicken dish, in which he also revealed that he has a Japanese grandmother. Unfortunately, he used the dumb deep fryer which was too hot and his chicken ended up both too dark and overcooked and put him in the bottom three.

Then in the elimination challenge, he chose the fight in Lewiston, Maine so he could make a seafood soup at which point Tom pointed out that Lewiston, Maine is nowhere near the ocean. And yet — somehow — The Weez weaseled out of going home yet again. I think the soup course was actually a shrewd choice; no one expects that much from soup.

You know if I had to predict who was going to screw up this challenge by serving a flavorless chicken breast it would’ve been the apple-cheeked granola pixie from Connecticut up here. Adrienne managed to avoid that fate though she did prove herself the worst at identifying spices. Technically she tied for last along with Justin and Eddie, but it was still pretty classic when she guessed “dried thyme” for the first three spices (a lá the Price Is Right one dollar strategy) only to abandon the strategy on the fourth spice, which was actually thyme.

Thus Adrienne had cemented her spot as the season’s whitest contestant even before the elimination challenge, in which she boldly chose the Thrilla in Manila so that she could employ some Southeast Asian spices, until Tom and judge Nilou Multi-pass gently explained that Filipino food is a lot different from Vietnamese food.

Adrienne shrewdly pivoted from “Southeast Asian flavors because the Philippines” to “spicy dish because the Thrilla In Manila was very hot.”

Damn, mama, that’s some good pivoting, did you go to art school? As any of us art majors could’ve told you, just make what you want to make and figure out your bullshit spiel justifying it later. Adrienne did it like a pro. She deserves an honorary MFA after a stunt like that (disclaimer: MFAs contain no monetary value).

Oh how I’m going to miss Eddie, easily this season’s most entertaining competitor. Mainly for moments like this, in the blind taste testing segment:

Bravo

Shot.

Bravo

Chaser.

Before we get to the elimination challenge, I think Eddie deserves some credit for being the only competitor not to use the deep fryer in the fried chicken challenge. A man after my own heart, Eddie shallow-fried his “double-breaded” chicken thighs in duck fat using a cast iron pan — the only one who controlled his own temperature and frying oil.

But then in the elimination challenge, he drew the New York fight so he could make a duck breast, but the Whole Foods only had frozen duck, so he pivoted to chicken. “You gotta bob and weave,” he said, which was actually a pretty good justification, but we all knew Eddie wasn’t going to be able to articulate it that well in front of a roomful of people. This is after all the guy who said, “My wife doesn’t like fish so I cooked her fish.”

Eddie ended up losing, which was also thematically fitting, since he drew the only fight that Muhammad Ali lost. I’m torn on being sad that Eddie went home for a dish that even the judges admitted wasn’t that bad, or blaming Eddie for this loss because he made a chicken breast, and about the best you could say for any chicken breast dish is “not that bad.”

I’m bummed Eddie’s going home, both selfishly for Power Rankings-entertainment-value reasons, and because he seems like one of the best chefs. Still, if you get to the final six and serve a chicken breast dish, you probably deserve to go home.

]]>https://uproxx.com/life/top-chef-power-rankings-1611/feed/0tchef-grid-uproxx-1.jpg‘Veep’ Star Matt Walsh On Playing The Everyman, Building UCB, And The Fascination Americans Have With Francehttps://uproxx.com/movies/matt-walsh-interview-veep-under-the-eiffel-tower-ucb/
https://uproxx.com/movies/matt-walsh-interview-veep-under-the-eiffel-tower-ucb/#respondFri, 15 Feb 2019 15:30:00 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401738087

For years, Matt Walsh was just that guy who would pop up in minor roles in sketches and in Todd Phillips movies, perhaps best known for his mini-monologue to Luke Wilson’s character in Old School begging to join the fraternity: “You listen to me. I need this, okay? My wife, my job, my kids. Every day is exactly the same. I go golfing on Sundays. …I hate golf.”

Walsh’s role as Selina Meyer’s long-suffering press secretary Mike McClintock on Veep has made Walsh much more of a household name, or at least a household face, though in many ways he’s still playing a version of that same working stiff who hates his life. Ironic considering Walsh, as one of the founding members of the UCB comedy troupe (along with Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, and Ian Roberts) which now has successful comedy venues in multiple cities), seems to have figured out a way to skip the rat race early on. Being able to parlay having the face of a beaten-down everyman into a life as a successful, working creative seems like some version of the American Dream, or finding a glitch in The Matrix, depending on your metaphor.

It’s still working. This week Walsh plays Stuart, an unemployed former bourbon salesman who tries to get his groove back by asking a friend’s 20-something daughter to marry him on a trip to Paris in Under The Eiffel Tower (which was released via streaming this week). She turns him down, sending him off on a mid-life crisis journey of self-discovery with a Scottish footballer played by Veep‘s Reid Scott and a French vineyard owner played by Judith Godreche. I spoke to Wash this week by phone.

I was curious about your struggle to become a full-time creative. Did you have to get part-time jobs on the way? What was that like?

As an actor?

Yeah, as an actor.

Well, when I started I was painting houses and I was moving furniture for a living. And then I delivered pizzas for a while. I did well in Chicago, and then at night I was doing shows seven nights a week. Comedy shows. And then I moved to New York in 1996 and I was surviving on sort of selling my van. Once I sold my van I had some rent money for a few months. Then fortunately we were, I think, subsidized by our friends who were writers at Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live. So our friends would throw us a sketch here and there so we could start working as actors when we landed in New York. So that was also good fortune.

That’s pretty cool. Who were those friends? Did you guys have any sort of pact? Or was that just sort of a thing that came about?

There was sort of always a great bond with the Conan O’Brien crew. Andy Richter was a good friend from Chicago, and he sort of had connected us to that show. Then Adam McKay started at Saturday Night Live. So between Tom Gianas and Adam McKay were writers there, and Horatio [Sanz] eventually came along to the show. So we had like friends at Conan, writers like Brian Stack and Brian McCann, and John Glasser. It was a lot of Chicago people.

So then there wasn’t like one day where you got a certain job and that was the day where you were like, “Well, now I can quit delivering pizzas or painting houses or whatever?”

You know, I was working for my father, and I was a salesman, and I got hired to be a touring company member for the Second City. In Chicago, you could make a living touring a little bit. So I quit working for my father and I never had to have what I would consider a real job after that.

What were you selling?

I was in machinery and moving. Like installation at factories, like all the heavy industry would occasionally retool and you’d take out their old machines and put in their new machines. Or if companies would move across the country, you would dis-assemble them. You’d have to put ’em on trucks. Very industrial, specialized industry. I was terrible at it. I hated it. I mean, it was interesting to go into a factory and see how things are made. But to be responsible for calculating how to do it, making it happen, I didn’t like that. It’s a very intricate mechanical processes, and very expensive machinery, so it was a little nerve-wracking. I was glad to get out of it.

As a founding member of U.C.B., how involved are you in all the theaters and their various projects? It seems like it’s a pretty big entity now.

I pay attention to emails every day and weigh in on stuff as much as I can.

What was your initial idea when you guys founded it? Did you have any idea of what it was gonna eventually become?

No. I don’t think anybody could. I think it was simply to have a clubhouse to do our shows and have our friends do their shows there. To start the long-form improv scene in New York.

Were you just sort of trying to model a New York scene after Chicago? Or did you guys have a model of what you were trying to do when you started it?

I think we had our own take on it, certainly. I mean, definitely was inspired by what we learned in Chicago, but we had our own take and philosophy. There’s a book, if you want to know about it. There’s a book about how to improvise. We wrote it.

What do you think is the dumbest character you’ve ever had to play in a sketch or in improv?

That’s a tough question. I don’t have a good answer for that one. I’m sorry, Vince.

So in this movie, Under The Eiffel Tower, there are a lot of people from Veep in it. What was the connection there? Did they just poach all of you?

They’re friends. Many of the people in the movie, because it’s a true indie, came over to make a movie in France for no money. So I used funny people that I already knew, like David Wain, Michaela Watkins, Reid Scott, and they were very game to come over to France and shoot a movie.

Right, so how much does getting to go to France factor into that decision when you’re looking to do a movie like this?

I think a lot of Americans, it’s very interesting. Yeah, we love to go over there.

So you were part of the casting process for this?

Yeah. I was a producer, did some writing, so… it was good.

What was the initial idea for the movie?

Two guys named Archie Borders and David Henry wrote a story about a friend who thick-headedly proposed to another family’s daughter who was like 20 years younger than him and ruined their vacation in Europe. So they began the story with that premise. And then the script came into my life a few years ago. And then I met Judith (Godrèche), we met randomly at some event, and we decided to work together and make a go of it. We became producers and did whatever we could to make it happen.

Was this influenced by other romantic comedies set in France? Do you think that’s a fertile setting for this type of story?

I think there’s an escapism. Like I said, Americans love going to France. And it’s a different culture. They have a different pace, and it’s a really different way to go about living. And I think romance, Paris, the Eiffel Tower are iconic, romantic destinations. The challenge was like, the romantic comedy has to deliver all of those sort of tropes, or cliches, which is you have a misunderstanding which pushes you further away. Then you have to come back in the end and profess your love and realize you may not get what you want, but if you do it openly and honestly you might get what you want. But you have to make those moments surprising and interesting. I think our focus on set was to be as naturalistic and let the dialogue play as realistically as possible. I think a lot of effort and conversation and thought went into that. I think that’s what’s charming about the film.

Your character is a bourbon guy. Is that something that you are into yourself?

I’ll sip a little bourbon, yeah. At a wedding. It’s a good wedding drink. Watch a storm roll in, drink a bourbon. That’s a good night.

You’re at the stage of your career where you’re a pretty successful character actor. One thing I’ve always wondered with character actors, do you feel pressure to take every job so you can keep working? Do you ever end up over-working yourself out of fear that the next job won’t come?

I don’t think I over-work myself. But I do think that I have a good work ethic and I do have a bit of a workaholic gene. I do like working. I love what I do and I like creative endeavors, stepping into them and bringing comedy to fruition. I do really enjoy that. But as a working character actor, yes, you do want to stay busy.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can check out his archive of movie reviews here.

Happy Valentines Day to all you happily coupled lovers out there. And for the rest of you, it’s time for your weekly fix of the Filmdrunk Frotcast for you frenzied forever-alone fanatics to foam from the face over. DID YOU SEE THAT ALLITERATION?!?! Sean Penn would be proud. This week Matt and Vince welcome Shereen Lani Younes and Anna Hossnieh from the podcast Ethnically Ambiguous. Shereen and Anna join the Frotsmen to talk Velvet Buzzsaw, Dan Gilroy’s newest film in the creepy-Gyllenhaal genre about an evil artist spirit that terrorizes the art world. We also talk Sean Penn’s grating writing style, the Oscars, Vince’s hatred of art, Vince’s preposterous love for the second season of True Detective, and how Anna’s father wore Raiders gear to a funeral in Iran. It’s an excellent episode that’s equally eccentric, esoteric, and… enfinitly eccessible? Everyone should endeavor to enjoy this entertaining experience. Alliteration rules. Enjoy! [-Written by Matt, obviously]

In this week’s b-b-b-b-BONUS Frotcast, Matt and Vince travel to hell on Earth, aka the Century City Mall, to review Alita: Battle Angel, the Robert Rodriguez-directed, James Cameron-produced adaptation of Gunnm, which has been in development since 2003. It’s the “cyberpunk” tale of a 300-year-old cyborg who gets a new body from Christoph Waltz that she uses to play “Motorball,” which is basically that sport from Starship Troopers meets roller derby. “She’s got the face of an angel and a body built for battle!” (Yes that is a real line from the movie)

Alita: Battle Angel opens today. If you want to wait to listen, that’s cool too, though we didn’t get especially spoilery with this one.

The movie reportedly cost between $150 and $200 million to make, and based on early numbers, it might as well be called “Alita: Tax Write Down.” Have you ever seen a movie that feels like they were making a sci-fi porno but had to turn it into a Disney Channel movie at the last second? Have you ever wanted to see Starship Troopers without the satire? Have you ever wanted to watch a sci-fi film where Mahershala Ali does Morpheus cosplay, Jennifer Connelly wears a bindi, and all the bad guys look like extras in a Lit video? Then friends, Alita: Battle Angel is for you.

In all honesty, this is a really fun movie to watch with your friends while you crack jokes and maybe have a few beers. Enjoy!

It’s true. This is our first do-over battle in 20 competitions. Though we’ve had a few concepts veer dangerously close to one another, none has been an exact repeat until now.

The reasons for this are three-fold. First, it’s hard to think of a Valentine’s-adjacent theme that can get us those sweet SEO clicks. More importantly, one of us (ahem, yours truly) was absolutely robbed last time because a few finicky fans don’t like fish. And finally, providing you — our faithful readers — with a recipe you might actually use to have sex is an allure we can’t deny.

Friends, a story. A few months ago, a buddy from work, one Aaron Williams, texted me for the first time ever. The text was sent late at night, around 10:30, and I was playing basketball at the gym.

Steve Bramucci

Reader, I didn’t have the battery power left to tell Aaron all that irked me about this recipe. Cream cheese? Vaguely “Italian” seasoning? Garlic powder? As a point of pride, I consider myself very unfussy. I order the sausage gravy at diners where you clearly ought not to. But you do not mess with Italian food. It’s the food of my father (an excellent home chef) and his father before him (a baker). My aunties in Italy will be patient in all things, but if you use a fork instead of your bare hand for rolling sausages on a skillet, they will jam that fork in your eye.

So if you ask me for advice on your recipe, you’re going to have to deal with my wrath. Which, in this case, means a dinner invite with a bunch of expensive food and booze. I’m a hardass like that. That’s exactly the vengeance Aaron received from me last month, when his girlfriend, Rhodé, arrived to town for a two-week visit. But I had to cancel. Twice. Finally, with Rhodé headed home to South Africa, I had one more shot.

“Come down tonight!” I urged. “I’m making…” It was up in the air. I’d just won our last challenge with stuffed pasta. And my last date night meal for this contest had been robbed of first place. I usually go into these with a plan; this time around, I had nothing.

I rushed to Whole Foods at 6. Guests were arriving at 7. I wandered around like a fool for ten minutes. Then I bought some shrimp. Who knows why. The human is an inscrutable lifeform and I’m no exception. I also bought pancetta. That is far more practical. Never criticize anyone for buying bacon.

And with that, an idea emerged. Pasta alla vodka. One of my favorite recipes and one I came to love when living in New York. In fact, this is far more a NYC dish than an Italian one. The Italian origins of the dish are murky, but in the five boroughs, it’s a goddamn institution. I rushed home and crashed into the kitchen at 6:45. Aaron, Rhodé, and another friend, Jenae would all be arriving at 7. I counted on them being fashionably late.

“Did you get milk for the baby?” my wife, Nikta, asked.

I hadn’t. She went to get milk. I started my son’s bedtime routine. Bath. Books. Bottle. While trying to prep the meal. It was basically this with less coke:

At 7 pm on the button, I was out of the shower and had two cans of tomatoes pureed and simmering with garlic and a heavy pour of vodka. The baby was still awake but I could put him down when Nikta got back. I needed the milk for his bottle. At 7:01 I heard our gate swing open. It was Aaron, Rhodé, and Jenae all at once. They’d met in the driveway.

I started the shrimp with butter and garlic before answering the door, so that they could have realistic hopes of eating soon.

Steve Bramucci

I made everyone cocktails. Nikta got home. I put the baby down. Everything was going well. Jeane remarked on being hungry and excited for dinner. Everyone cosigned. I started to mix pasta dough.

And then it all ground to a halt. In my rush, I hadn’t let the dough rest long enough. It started tearing in the machine. The sauce needed management. I had to explain a board game. Second cocktails were due. There was boisterous conversation.

Stephen Bramucci

I peeled the shrimp and got their husks into my tomato puree. There’s flavor to be had there and I didn’t want to miss out on it. I also put some parsley into the pot. Next, I did my pancetta, with onions.

Steve Bramucci

That’s a reallllly rough chop on those onions (I was crazed by this point and we’d moved onto wine) so I used a remedy that’s straight out of the ol’ “Bone Broth Bramuch” playbook and put an inch of broth in there. Plus another glug of vodka. That way, the onions would be softer once the liquid had evaporated and the pancetta started to sizzle and crisp up.

I got the pasta dough going again. Starting at setting 5 then 4 then 3 then 2… it was working. At this point, I could have gone to 1 and made stuffed pasta with my shrimp, which were set aside and waiting. Or I could have made it into fettuccine, which was meant to reference Aaron’s original text, but then —

I looked at the time. It was 9:30. Who knows how that happened. It’s impossible to say what strange alchemy of alcohol, conversation, and frenzied cooking forced the seconds to fly past. But the fact remained that a guest was leaving my dinner party without eating. It didn’t bode well.

Fearful of losing anyone else, I decided to forgo fettuccine and stuffed pasta and made stracci, Italian for “rags.” Little pieces of glutenous hand-torn pasta. Now let me clarify, stracci is a miracle. It holds sauce beautifully. It carries flavor better than any shape I know. It gets so slick and sexy after boiling in broth (which is how I fortify all my pasta these days). But I had a sinking feeling by making it.

Why? Because I’d just introduced my friend and fellow competitor Vince to the concept. Told him all about it. Explained the technique. And I knew he would be making it the next night for his dish. I can’t deny this. But I had no choice. I figured Vince might change tacts. I would warn him. After all, he wouldn’t have known about stracci without me.

I tore my pasta into pieces and got it into the broth. I strained my tomato, garlic, and shrimp base and combined it with pieces of shrimp that were cut at about a 1/8th of an inch. I added another few glugs of vodka and a whole lot of Parmagianno. Then I added about a half a cup of cream.

Steve Bramucci

While the noodles cooked, I made grilled raddichio with olive oil. Easy and necessary for a little balance. I snipped my signature herbs — just parsley and fresh oregano — grated a little more parm and we were out the door.

The process was a shit show. The photos are up and down. The cleanup conversation with Nikta was clear and direct… and resulted in me cleaning up solo at midnight. But the food… that dish — Italian by way of Brooklyn, with a nice seafood flavor (almost like a lobster bisque), and those pasta rags that I’d gifted to then stolen from Vince — was just what I needed at 10 pm on a Tuesday.

Rhodé indulged her host with a “this is tasty” photo. Aaron, however, refused this opportunity at fame. Perhaps because he liked his food so much that he was left insatiable. Or maybe because he was eating dinner at 10 pm and was half-starved. Who’s to say!?

I dig the pasta (looks like better stripping than Vince’s) and I also dig the grilled radicchio (made the plate pop). But, dude, you cooked shrimp twice? There’s no way in hell those things weren’t more rubbery than a twice used condom on February 15th. You know you can peel shrimp while they’re raw, right? So you cooked them and then chopped them up and cooked them again long enough for the sauce to reduce??? Good lord, son. I can abide a lot from you, Steve, but cooking those shrimp to death might be a bridge too far.

Oh, and Aaron, I use the recipe for Fettuccine all’Alfredo from Il Vero in Rome (where it was invented). Boil 250g of fettucine (half a pound) until it’s al dente (always use fresh). Scoop the cooked pasta onto a warmed plate (keep a cup or so of the pasta water to the side). Add 125 g (one-quarter pound) of each unsalted high-quality butter and finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Use a large spoon and fork to the toss the pasta while adding small amounts of the pasta water (maybe a quarter cup) until a very smooth and velvety sauce forms. Grind some salt and cracked pepper to taste over the dish and serve. It’s literally this easy.

Vince on Steve’s Dish:

Christ, I’m stressed out just reading this. I’m vicariously mortified that you had a dinner guest leave without eating. Do you know how pissed I’d be if I showed up for nice pasta and had to get McDonald’s on the way home? Are we sure she just didn’t go out to Rockaway to get her hat?

I don’t even know where to start with this. Penne alla vodka was one of the first “fancy” dishes I ever learned to cook, so I can’t pretend I’m entirely above it, but I think we can all understand that this dish becoming a “thing” is one of the great accidents of history. Consider the name alone. Two problems with vodka as the main ingredient in an Italian dish immediately present themselves: First, vodka is Russian. And second, it has no flavor. Vodka is grain alcohol distilled to a high proof and watered down with water and hopefully, made as smooth as possible. Its flavors are ethyl alcohol and water. Who knows what it even adds to the sauce? Likely nothing (and I’ve heard chefs who have this sauce on their menus admit as much). But one goombah deglazes a tomato-cream sauce with alcohol 70 years ago and now we’re stuck with it. It’s like the Electoral College of food.

It does have its place — I learned vodka sauce as a light, quick alternative to a heavy gravy. Instead of a gravy that simmers for hours, you throw some fresh tomatoes in a pan with a little garlic and olive oil and red pepper and finish it with a little cream, and you’ve got a nice bright sauce in 15 minutes. Meanwhile, YOU simmered your tomatoes for hours, tried to render some shrimp heads in there, and added massive hanks of onion chopped by a blind man boiled in bone broth. This is a disaster… but I think you know that.

Matt on Steve’s Dish:

Anything “alla vodka” always looks like unicorn jizz to me. Nothing should ever be pink and creamy but salty too. That said, the ingredients and preparation under pressure are appreciated, and I’m sure it tastes great.

ZACH’S “LANCASHIRE TACOS”

Zach Johnston

Tacos are the perfect date food if you ask me. They’re pretty straightforward, easy to make ahead of time and build on date night, and endlessly adaptable. Make some tasty protein ahead of time. Work together making tortillas. Then each of you can add a little of this, take away a little of that, make it your own. Everyone goes to bed happy.

Thing is, my wife (shut up, Vince) is from northwestern England, Lancashire to be exact. So, my plan here is to bring the ingredients from her home to the food from mine. It’s Indigenous English food meets an Indigenous American food delivery system.

I’m replacing masa with milled barley. I’m using a super fatty organic beef short rib and basting that motherfucker in a British berry and maple glaze with gin-reminiscent juniper. Then I’m braising off some heavy-duty English Savoy cabbage in the jus from the short rib and butter — it’ll be a crunchy umami bomb when I’m done. As the coup de grâce, I’m grabbing a super crumbly and funky English Stilton and sprinkling it on top. It’s the taco you know and love with a wholly new flavor profile.

The Meat

Zach Johnston

Zach’s back with his sous vide for this one, folks. I went to the butcher and got a one-and-half-pound chunk of short rib. You better believe it’s bone in.

I generously salt and pepper the whole thing with Alpine salt and freshly cracked black and white pepper. I then grab fresh sprigs of rosemary, thyme, bay, and sage and put everything into a vacuum seal bag and suck all that air out of it.

Zach Johnston

I place the rib in the water bath for 24 hours on 158F. That’s it.

I’m going for that point where the meat can still be sliced into pieces but falls apart very easily. Not quiet stringy but on the verge. You don’t want it too soft.

The Glaze

Zach Johnston

My berry glaze is pretty straightforward. I dump about one-half cup each fresh blackberries and fresh redcurrants into a small saucepan. I add another half-cup of each apple cider vinegar and grade A maple syrup (I was out of honey). I add a pinch of salt and a few juniper berries.

I bring that to a simmer and use a spoon over time to mash the berries down until about 2/3 of the volume is simmered down. I then use a hand blender to smooth it into a glaze. You should have about half a cup of glaze at the end.

Zach Johnston

About a half-an-hour before the rib is done in the sous vide, I crank my oven up to its highest setting to warm up. When the short rib is done, I fish it out of the water bath. I remove the bits of herbs and pat it dry then place it in a skillet. I use a food brush to completely cover the rib in the glaze. It’ll take about half of the glaze. I save the rest for later.

Zach Johnston

I place the short rib into the oven for about 20-25 minutes until the glaze starts to caramelize. The berry, sweetness and fat blend and fill my kitchen with a wondrous smell.

I then wrap up the rib in greaseproof paper and tin foil and let it rest for about an hour. Basically, I timed this so my wife (Vince…) and I can have lunch together. So this is resting while I drive to pick her up from work.

Zach Johnston

Barley Tortillas

Zach Johnston

This is the pretty easy part. I went down to the local organic supermarket and bought some barley berries and milled them on the finest setting at the store.

I then used about one cup of the barley flour with maybe one-eighth cup of warm water and a pinch of two of salt. Basically, if you’ve made masa tortillas, I did the same thing here. I grab my tortilla press, an old ziplock, hot pan, and start making small barley tortillas.

Zach Johnston

I’m not going to lie. I didn’t expect this work. I had blue corn masa on hand to switch to in case the barley failed. The bet paid off. The barley tortillas were super soft and malleable. They worked almost exactly as the masa does. The flavor is drastically different. There’s no sweetness here. It’s more savory with an almost malty/beer echo. It’s really fucking good is what I’m saying.

Zach Johnston

Toppings

Zach Johnston

I take a few of the outer leaves of the Savoy cabbage and slice them into thick slivers. I then dump all of that into a little cold salt water to take some of the bitterness out.

Zach Johnston

I get out my big saucepan and melt a big tablespoon of unsalted butter and let it start to just brown. I add in the drained cabbage and toss it a few times.

Zach Johnston

I add in the jus from the sous vide bag the rib came out of. That massive umami liquid goes into the pan and I use to deglaze the butter into the cabbage. Just as the cabbage turns a deep green, I remove it from the heat. The butter, jus, and cabbage have turned the cabbage into crispy umami bombs. It’s magic.

Zach Johnston

Finally, I get open up my Stilton and it’s already crumbling. Perfection.

Serve

Zach Johnston

I don’t know if there’s anything more English than Savoy cabbage, beef, barely, and Stilton. Those things together in taco form are shockingly good.

I dig into the short rib and it falls off the bone. The fat cap peels right off without any real effort. I slice up the lean with plenty of fat still on it. Basically, I make a plate to take a photo but really, this is a make your own taco affair.

Zach Johnston

I take a barley tortilla and brush some of the berry glaze on first and then put meat on that. Next, I add some Savoy cabbage and some of the super blue Stilton. I grab a couple redcurrants I had used as a garnish for an extra tart bite against the massive funk of the cheese and umami of the cabbage. It’s goddamn delightful.

Zach Johnston

That above photo is proof of concept that barley flour does, indeed, work well as a taco shell. It’s soft and foldable without falling apart. The meat was melt-in-your-mouth perfect with a nice sweet/savory/fatty/earthiness. The Stilton was the perfect counterpoint and the crunch of the cabbage alongside the bursting tart berries. It was everything you wanted it to be.

If Steve’s brand is 17 different herbs, the most on-brand thing Zach has ever written is using the phrase “and now comes the easy part” before describing how he milled his own barley… to make barley tortillas with. The other thing is when he inevitably gets pissed if he doesn’t win this challenge because a reader in Ohio didn’t sufficiently respect his combination of short rib, stilton, barley, and cabbage. It’s kind of hard to judge a singular combination of ingredients we’ve never had individually. Mmm?

That glazed short rib looks amazing and I think if you’d served that and the cabbage over some potatoes for the missus and a mate named Bread you’d have a cunting good feed. You could give it one of those weird names English dishes have, like “Slimy Knickers.” Oi, pass da sloimy knickas, guv. Me an me mate Bread is wew famished.

Tenor

That stilton seems better served as dessert. And I’m impressed that you made barley tortillas pliable enough for tacos (I haven’t even mastered that with masa), but again, no frame of reference here. I feel like a date night meal should feel comforting, not artistically challenging. This is like trying to unwind with experimental jazz.

I guess it’s about the notes you’re not playing. On that note, chop up those damned currants. There’s a reason no one ever made a salsa out of whole grapes.

Steve on Zach’s Dish:

I feel like these tacos made me relate deeply to relationship Zach. I imagine him telling his Lancashire wife, “I made a dish just for you, my sweet!” and then proceeding to explain how he turned anything that might be comforting and familiar to her into some weird taco that’s secretly about him. As the author of the “Honey, you need a break so I bought us tickets to this incredible surfing spot where you can have lots of time walking on the beach while I ride the waves” playbook, I am an expert at recognizing such scenarios.

I’m also not sure that this barley tortilla did hold up. It feels a little “doth protest too much” to me. A picture of it folded like a U is supposed to convince me? Show me with a bite taken out. I’ll wait.

Okay, speculation aside, the meat is surely great (I rolled my eyes and stopped editing when I saw “sous vide,” someone please let me know if there are spelling or grammatical errors in that section) and I love berries and glazes, so a berry glaze sounds like my jam (literally). But can we talk about stilton? Seems like an odd date night call, ZJ. You know the old saying, “If you want to have wild sex, go for THE STRONGEST FUCKING CHEESE ON EARTH.”

On the ranking of “sexiest foods” I think my choices of shrimp and vodka and cream all make the top 100. Stilton is down there with anchovies and the 100-year egg. Oh and savoy cabbage.

Ultimately, I like this stuff and I like Zach’s inventiveness and I like British comfort food. And yet I can’t get myself at all excited about this taco. Not because my palate doesn’t like to experiment, but because I like my date nights to feel a little less masturbatory.

Matt on Zach’s Dish:

“I’m replacing masa with milled barley.” Stop right there, and never start again. To paraphrase comic Greg Proops on why there’s no good Mexican food in Britain, no Mexican ever said, “My people, let us leave our land of sun and flavor…”

Also, stilton on a taco? Stilton is great, but only if you want to taste nothing but Stilton for the next two fucking days. You could switch the meat out with Twizzlers, no one would know. That said, I would eat the shit out of these if I were drunk.

VINCE’S HAND-TORN PASTA (STRAPPONI)

Before our Italian comfort food challenge I had been complaining about not knowing what to make, thinking I’d already used up all my Italian comfort foods after making chicken cacciatore, ravioli, and various other grandma staples for previous challenges. Steve suggested I make “strapponi,” to which I replied “haha okay whatever shut up, Steve,” as is my standard response for most things.

But I made a note of it, and maybe a week later I started looking up recipes and discovered one on my new favorite YouTube Channel, Pasta Grannies. I tried to copy the way they made the strapponi, wrapping the pasta dough around the rolling pin and tearing it off into the water, and it instantly became my new favorite dish. To me it’s kind of like the pasta of pasta, the most hand-made version of it, with no machine cut edges. I also love the way it mixes with sauce, creating big, gooey layers of noodle sheets, almost like an Italian pad see yew.

I chose this for a date night meal because — and I’m the only unmarried one in this challenge so maybe don’t quote me on any of this — it seems to me that the root of a date night meal is cooking as a sensual act, the inherent intimacy of kneading and pounding something into shape with your bare hands and then feeding it to someone you love. I make a this a for you with a my a bare a hands! It’s familiar, it’s comforting, it makes it seem like you’re substantial and you know what you’re doing. Pasta is all love and elbow grease. And strapponi is the most personal, idiosyncratic, and delicately unique form of food.

Plus, you can’t spell “strapponi” without “strapp on” so you know you’re headed for a good night.

For the Sauce

Vince Mancini

A tomato-based sauce feels the most comforting to me, but full Bolognese seemed too heavy and marinara too boring. I sort of split the difference, where I got the kind of meat that would give it a meatball flavor but let it just mix freely with the sauce so it’d be nice and uniform and maintain the nice texture of the noodles.

Ground chuck

Pork belly (I always just get the cheapest cuts of beef and pork on offer and grind them myself but the bougie Whole Foods I went to didn’t really have any cheap cuts)

Celery/Onion/Carrot/Garlic

Tomato paste, Italian chopped tomatoes

Pecorino Romano (adds more flavor than parmesan, in my opinion, and yes, the pecorino part — meaning it came from sheep’s milk — is important)

This works how most sauces work — brown the meat, remove, add the vegetables and cook in the fat until soft, then add the tomatoes, paste, and browned meat and let it simmer.

A couple of specific notes:

I cubed the pork belly then pulsed it in the food processor to create a coarse grind. That went in the pot first at a pretty high heat. Naturally, that had quite a bit of fat in it so after I removed the browned pork I skimmed some off. But that rendered fat is important because when you drop in the ground beef right after, it caramelizes on the outside in that screaming hot pork fat. The effect is like when you put a meatball in an oily pan or deep fry it — Maillard city. It’s a super important flavor layer. I season the meat liberally with salt, pepper, and MSG. Also, the meat t0 tomato ratio in this is much lower than a Bolognese.

Vince Mancini

Cook those veggies until they’re aaaall the way soft and melting before you add the tomatoes — healthy squirt of paste and then the box, in this case.

Vince Mancini

Season at every stage. Simmer at least 15 minutes. It’s going to seem a little heavy, but you only want enough to just coat the noodles, so it has to be flavorful.

For The Pasta

Vince Mancini

Since this pasta is a little rustic, I mix in some semolina. It adds great flavor and color.

3 eggs, 3 yolks (so 6 eggs, minus 3 whites)

1.5 cup 00 flour

.5 cup semolina

Sprinkle of turmeric (this doesn’t add noticeable flavor, just enhances the yellow of the semolina and double yolks)

I mix and knead this into a dough ball and let it rest, covered, at room temperature for about a half hour or so (while the sauce simmers). Once that’s done I cut the dough into fourths.

Vince Mancini

From here you just get right up in that dough’s face and whisper “I’m going to pound you flat and then tear you apart.”

Vince Mancini

With cut pasta or ravioli I put it through the machine until I can see my hand through it. This pasta doesn’t need to get quite that thin, but it definitely still takes some elbow grease to get it where it needs to be. It’s going to stretch and thin a little naturally when you tear it off.

Putting It Together

Vince Mancini

Here’s how I set up my station. Boiling water (as salty as the sea), pan on low heat with a little butter, warm sauce.

Vince Mancini

What I’m going to do is, wrap the pasta sheets around my rolling pin, and tear them into the boiling water. I’m going to cook those about two minutes, then scoop them out with a big strainer and toss them into the butter pan. To that I add a scoop of sauce, a scoop of pasta water, and a handful of cheese. I just want a thin coating of sauce uniformly on all the noodles.

Vince Mancini

Vince Mancini

It’s important to note that it’s not just noodle/sauce. It’s noodle, butter, pasta water, cheese, and sauce. It’s all the components that add up to the perfect pasta texture.

Vince Mancini

Garnish with more cheese. It really is my favorite plate of food. Those big fat, delicately idiosyncratic noodles hold the sauce just perfectly and it’s so warm and savory and comforting and delicious. And it’s probably the easiest to eat of any pasta — all you need is a fork and you don’t have to worry about sauce flying everywhere like with regular noodles, or about breaking the dumplings when you serve like with stuffed pasta. It’s the best, in part because it feels the simplest.

If your date doesn’t love you after you make this you’re probably unloveable.

Vince Mancini

Steve on Vince’s Dish:

You are truly the best in this contest at cooking food that people can fathom and understand and you’ve done it here again. This looks great, the pasta is beautifully coated, and I’m never going to oppose a ragu or riff on Bolognese. This just feels a little like a one-hander for you. You’re doing Grind House instead of trying to reach the heights of Inglorious Basterds. As such, no one would regret ordering your dish, but would it get ordered on a date night when there are giant shrimps and Zach’s beloved stilton in play?

You pasta making is impeccable, we know that. But this sauce seems a little unfinished to me. Those carrots are still holding their shape — which makes me think that they haven’t had enough time to simmer. And the flavors just seem so straightforward and a little one note: Dressed up tomato meat sauce. That’s great and all, but is it the sort of shot that it takes to win this contest? (The scoreboard says yes, Steve. This might not be helping.)

I’d order this drunk. I’d order it hungover. I’d order it in winter and after a workout and with my family. But for a date? I like the sex you infused in the writing, but the dish itself didn’t leave me horny enough.

Zach on Vince’s Dish:

Pasta again, again. This is the opposite of Steve’s dish. While it doesn’t quite feel phoned-in per se, it does feel a bit “whatever.” Look, strapponi it a great rustic dish. Even then, it feels like a dish you make when you’re too tired to actually execute a specific cut of pasta.

I do have to give you points for the ease at which you made this dish. Compared to Steve’s frenetic cooking, this feels like a good time. The rustic ragu looked fine albeit very basic — which is okay, I guess. My biggest concern is more that it looked very undercooked. Those onions, carrots, and celery should have all melted into the sauce by the end, releasing sugars and flavor into the gravy. This feels very much like it was underdone and not quite cohesive.

I’d still eat the shit out of this though and more points for making everything sexual in your writing!

Matt on Vince’s Dish:

The name Strapponi is fantastic and so good I’m having a hard time believing it’s really Italian and not an offshoot of the penis pasta you bring to bachelorette parties. I had no problem with the dish until I saw he used carrots in the sauce. Ah, carrots! Full of sugar, but also gross! Carrots! An unpleasant snap like a bird’s leg when you bite into them raw, mushy and nasty when you cook them. Carrots! A vegetable curse! He might as well have thrown a scoop of old cake frosting in there. Other than that, looks delish.

It’s been 27 years since Dead, the lead shrieker of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, blew his brains out, and 25 since Euronymous, the guy who put a picture of Dead’s corpse on an album cover, was in-turn murdered by Varg Vikernes. Since then there have been a few documentaries about the saga, a few television specials, and a handful of magazine features, but never a scripted feature film.

Which means those of us who’ve been following this strange story have been waiting a long time for Jonas Akerlund’s new film, Lords Of Chaos, starring Rory Culkin as Euronymous and Brooklyn‘s Emory Cohen as Varg Vikernes. Akerlund, who when I spoke to him had just wrapped shooting an Old Navy commercial, seems both an odd choice for the project and the perfect one. I ask him whether his corporate clients like Old Navy know about his Satanic metal movie and he jokes, “I’m not inviting them to the premiere.”

Akerlund is just kidding though, and his history with metal actually predates his filmmaking career, having been the original drummer in the Swedish proto-black metal band, Bathory before transitioning to filmmaking. Since then, he has directed dozens of music videos and commercials, as well as Spun, perhaps the lesser-known of 2002’s dueling meth movies (the other being Salton Sea), and a Mads Mikkelsen assassin thriller that just came out on Netflix — Polar.

But it’s arguably Lords of Chaos that most draws on Akerlund’s formative experiences. And given that Vikernes was (or eventually became, depending on your perspective) a white supremacist, a Nordic nationalist (Euronymous being Sami was one of Vikerne’s posthumous justifications for killing him), and a famous criminal heartthrob, there were a lot of difficult choices to be made about what was most important to this story and what could fit. It has… a lot of moving parts. Not to mention a fair degree of danger, considering Vikernes, a convicted killer, is out of prison now. Perhaps Akerlund still subconsciously courts danger, like the metal musician he was, and the ones he depicts in Lords of Chaos. In any case, I had a lot of questions. I spoke to Akerlund by phone last week.

—

Are you in the middle of production now?

I was just doing a music video with Rammstein in Berlin. I brought the band to the screening.

What did Rammstein think of Lords of Chaos?

Two of them had seen it before. But they like it. It’s obviously a very different world from their very interesting history, but they understand rock ‘n roll. They also have a pretty extreme story behind them, so.

I’ll have to do a separate interview where I ask you about Rammstein. So tell me about the genesis of this project. I imagine this has been in development for quite some time.

Yeah, in different iterations though, because I started as thinking about it for quite some time. And I remember when I made my first movie, Spawn, here in LA. I was pitching the idea of Norwegian black metal, and I remember I went to some of the big agencies here with pictures of kids with corpse makeup, and they were like, “There’s the door. Get out.” This was at a time when people didn’t even know I was from Sweden. They thought I was from Switzerland. Scandinavia has become more of a solid place that people actually know what it is lately. Back then it was like, not so many Swedes here. So in my head, it’s been around for a long time, and other people have been on it, and then there’s a book coming out, and there’s a documentary coming out…It’s been marinating in me for a long time. And then like six years ago or so, I decided to really go for it. I didn’t know that it was gonna take this long and be this hard work, but I wrote it pretty fast, because I’d been thinking about it for such a long time. And I brought in Dennis [Magnusson], who became my writing partner. And then we just took it from there. I was lucky because Ridley Scott and his company liked the project, and attached themselves. And then Vice came onboard. Then it was like a patchwork of financing to get it made.

That seems crazy to me that someone wouldn’t immediately want to make a movie about Satanic church-burning metal kids.

Right? That’s what I thought, but you know, it’s still a hard sell. The movie’s doing really well, and people seem to like it, but it’s happening slowly. It’s growing, but it’s not like your big premiere at every shopping mall in America, with big advertising. It has to have its own life, and people have to discover it.

So just before this interview, I was reading that you were in Bathory, which I didn’t know about. Did you have any personal connection to the story? Had you had run-ins with any of the characters in the story?

Well, yes and no. We were a couple of years earlier, and then I got into film editing, and kind of left drumming behind pretty fast. But I feel like the first act of Lords of Chaos is very much like what we did with Bathory. You know when you’re trying to figure out your sound and your coloring your hair, you’re awkward with girls. You’re drawing a logo, putting the band together, having a garden party. You know… it’s all that stuff was kind of what we were doing with Bathory. And Per, “Dead” in the film, who commits the suicide, he was Swedish, and he was a couple of years younger than me, but he was kind of part of the metal scene in Sweden. He was in a band called Morbid at the same that was in Bathory. So we had connections. And actually, the first music video I ever shot… which was like, I don’t know, 1987 maybe? Per was in the video as an extra. It was a video for the Swedish metal band called Candlemass. So I have a little bit of connection with him, and when he committed his suicide, news traveled really slowly back then, but obviously, we all knew who he was and were taken by it.

How much did you rely on the Lords of Chaos book for this? [Editor’s note: an often very dry book consisting largely of interviews with key figures]

Not as much as you would think, actually, because the research materials available is pretty big. So we had the rights to the book early on so we could clear names. And we called the project Lords of Chaos, and I made this logo that we still have in the film, and we kind of fell in love with the title. But we did learn that the title itself was very infected by people’s opinions about the book. And people in the black metal world have a lot of opinions about the book. And I didn’t wanna confuse them, because the movie is a very different perspective than the book is. But at the same time, we all liked the title, so we kind of just stayed on.

But my research writing the script was much bigger than the book Lords of Chaos. There was everything from other books and documentaries and pictures. Luckily for me, these kids — and this is all pre-mobile phones — they were really good at taking pictures of everything. And the police reports, and meeting people that was there. It was a ton of things that I could use. And the truth is that this could easily have been a series instead of a movie, because there’s so many interesting side stories that I just didn’t have room for in the movie. It’s a movie. It’s two hours long. And you have to focus. But there’s a lot of side-tracking that I couldn’t fit in, and a lot of great characters and other stories that I wish I could put into the movie, but I couldn’t.

So tell me about this conception of Varg. I had read that book and had seen a lot of stuff on the story, and this was not a take that I had seen on him before, but it felt really right when I was watching it.

Yeah, I mean… I say it in the beginning of the movie, that it’s based on truth and lies. The hardest part of the research was to figure out what was going through their heads, and how the relationship really was between these young boys. Because they were boys. They were basically children. We forget about that. In all the documentaries and in the book, they are portrayed like demons and monsters. But in the movie, I tried to make them a little more humanized, and reminding us that they were so young.

And that goes for all the characters in the film. I had to have a little bit of freedom to make a movie as much as I wanted it to be real. And it was a balance. But [Varg’s] truth is in the film, too, because he has been telling this story over and over again. There’s a lot of things that he’s been saying that I used in the film. And there’s also a few things that actually happened. We know that he killed Euronymous, and we know that they burned down these churches.

Right. I mean, in the movie, it seems like you sort of characterize it as this competition of one-ups-manship, and not this inherently evil thing, and… well, it rang true, for whatever reason.

Well great, great.

On that note, when you’re making a movie where the portrayal of Varg isn’t super flattering, did you ever worry about the fact that you might be pissing off some guy who’s killed people?

I don’t know. I’m sorry I cannot comment on that, but it’s like… I mean, it’s… I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to talk about. But I knew from day one that Varg wasn’t gonna like this project, but I also knew that I didn’t want him to stop me from making it. I didn’t want him to stop the audience from seeing this film.

Right.

But I’m not here to piss anybody off. I tried to treat it with respect. But this is a story that’s been around for a long time, and it’s already been told a million times. I’m not doing anything new here. It’s just a different way of telling it, a different perspective. And… a lot of bands are dreaming to have a movie made about their band. Queen gets a movie, and Mayhem gets a movie. It’s fucking amazing. So in a way, it’s like, I’m not asking them to be happy about it, but I know some of them are, because I know all the other guys. The only one I don’t know is Varg.

You didn’t really go into his white supremacist beliefs. Do you think that was just something he got more into later and not relevant, or just didn’t have enough room, or what was the decision process there?

My whole take on the political and religious side of this story was that I don’t think there was a political agenda at the time. I think it became that later, but I think at the time, they were young boys playing around with symbols. And I see it in pictures where he actually has an upside down cross and a Nazi flag and a picture of Odin in his room. And the same with Euronymous. He had like Stalin on his walls and all these weird things. It was almost a mess. And I can identify with that. I know when we did Bathory we wrote a lot of dark lyrics… But we didn’t have a political agenda. We didn’t know what we were talking about! And I think a lot of this was created afterwards, and I think it became more real later.

What about this idea of having this metal scene, or just any scene where people are part of it and making art together. Do you think that that exists in music anymore?

I think it does, but I think it’s harder to have a voice. I think you can scream very loud without anyone hearing you. I think the nuances were smaller back then than it is today. It’s probably more art made today than it was back then, because it’s easier to get it done, and it’s more of a real thing today. I mean, we were doing music not ever dreaming to actually make it. Or same with me when I started as a filmmaker. The thought of working in America and working with big artists or whatever, the thought of working outside Sweden was just not even on my radar. I think today the pressure of doing any sort of art is bigger than it was back then, because the expectation is like, if you don’t have millions of followers or millions of hits or millions of whatever, it’s like you’re nothing, you know? So I think that may limit you a little bit, but I think the art’s definitely there. In the basements of family homes there’s these probably like thousands of fantastic rock bands that we will never hear.

Right. I mean, do you think that there are too many ways to measure popularity quantitatively now? You know, it seems like everybody has numbers for things, whereas they didn’t back then. It was just you were famous among your friends and that was cool.

Yeah, I mean, we definitely did not have that. But yeah, no, I think so. And I think it’s a pressure. It’s a pressure with kids just to get likes. That’s something we couldn’t imagine.

So you do a good job contextualizing the story within Norway and what was happening at the time. Is there anything specific to Scandinavia that non-Scandinavians might miss in this movie?

Nah. Well, the fact that I shot it in Budapest, for starters. And the fact that I did it in an English language with English-speaking actors. Those are the big steps away from the reality, but the movie is filled with details that are correct. It’s like everything from the posters to the patches to the t-shirts to the shoes to the instruments. The look of stuff and the hairdos and all that stuff is pretty damn close. And I got that confirmed from a lot of people who were there and the pictures that we’ve seen and all that. I didn’t wanna give the black metal community the pleasure of catching me in details that are not right. And personally, I hate when movies are wrong. I hate when I see like, “Oh no, those sneakers didn’t come out until three years later.” I hate that. I really wanted it to be correct.

Tell me about casting Emory Cohen. He’s so different in every movie, and he was so completely different from any of his other roles in this. What had you seen him in that made you want to cast him, and how did that turn it out?

I mean, I had seen him in everything after that point, but Brooklyn had just come out, and I had my eyes on him earlier, too. To be honest, he was the last one I cast, and originally, I met Jack [Kilmer, who plays Dead] for Varg, and then I met Rory for Euronymous, and then I met a lot of others. In one way, it was easy to cast, because I had a very clear image in my head on what the characters should be. But the difficult part was to get good chemistry between these kids, make sure that they felt like they were from the same world.

And all these kids, they were so dedicated. They really lived and breathed it. They didn’t wanna take off their wigs. After we were done with the shoot, Rory had a really hard time to separate with his character. He stole his leather jacket, and he wanted to keep the hair. Even though our shoot was so short, but it was very intense. We had a good prep time to learn all the instruments and get into character, but the shoot was only 18 days, so it’s a really quick shoot.

There’s that scene where I think Varg comes in wearing a jacket, and Euronymous is making fun of one of his patches. That scene seemed like it came with a certain amount of personal experience. What was it like when you were in that scene where people are kind of judging each other by their tastes and stuff all the time?

I mean, we made a point out of their relationship starting in a weird way, and also how affected Varg was by Euronymous and his black circle. I’ll tell you a little side story. I haven’t told this to anybody, but it was actually meant to be shot it with a Dr. Feelgood, Mötley Crüe’s patch. And then one of my producers said, “You have to clear it. It’s a close-up, we have to clear it.” And Nikki Sixx said no. He actually said, like, “No way.” And we send him the scene, and I was like, “Come on, dude, we’re not making fun of you. These guys were fucked up and they didn’t like anything, especially American glam rock.”

But he couldn’t take it. Nikki Sixx was worried that his brand was gonna be damaged. So he said no. So as a backup, we [shot it with a Scorpions patch], which is not really correct, actually, because Scorpions, at that time, was not cheesy. If you were metal back then, Scorpions was cool. All the ’70s stuff and early ’80s stuff with Scorpions still, to this day, is fucking awesome. I feel a little bad. Doing that, it should really be Mötley Crüe, or any of the American acts from that time. That’s the biggest contrast. Norwegian black metal and the Sunset Strip glam rock. You couldn’t be further away from each other.

Speaking of things that don’t seem to happen anymore, back then, it seemed like if you were into black metal, you could only be into that, and you couldn’t listen to Mötley Crüe or whatever. It doesn’t seem like [that kind of specialization] is as much of a thing nowadays.

Yeah, no, but it was definitely back then. I remember myself hiding a few albums from my friends. Like, it’s like, “Shit. I’ve got these Genesis albums and Peter Gabriel albums. I can’t show them to my friends.” Stuff like that. But Euronymous did, though. He was big on electronic music. He was a big Tangerine Dream fan, he was a big Dead Can Dance fan. And a lot of extreme music that was not just metal. So he definitely had ears for other things. But yeah, it was that era. You had to have the right t-shirt.

In terms of the Nazi connections, there’s always been this weird crossover between metal and certain types of Nazi imagery. Is that just two different groups that both were into the occult, or is there something more to that connection?

I don’t know if it’s actually true. To me, metal has always had a sense of wit and a sense of humor in there, and also kind of a distance between, “What is reality and what’s fantasy?” But obviously in this case, it became something else, and I feel like all the political reasonings that they had was added on later. I really think they were playing around with symbols, lyrics, darkness, watched horror movies and these horror movies were very extreme, and I think it was more that than a proper agenda, you know?

Well, our time is winding down. Do you have anything to add?

I’m just so grateful that this movie’s out, and I’ve been having the chance to see it now at festivals with an audience, and it’s just incredible for me as a director to sit in the audience and feel the energy. It’s like, I have four billion hits on YouTube, but I have never sat next to my audience ever. And the fact that this movie’s coming out and it’s like… People are gonna be able to see it on a big screen in a room with other people. It’s definitely the best way to experience this movie.

This week on Top Chef, the chefs got the chance to cook for “an arena full of Kentucky fans,” as Padma put it. Which most of us probably assumed meant that the contestants would be cooking at the half time of a Kentucky game. As it turned out, nope, there was no game, just an entire arena full of fans in full Kentucky regalia — cheerleaders, face painters, the whole nine — who had turned out to watch a live episode of Top Chef. This was a challenge designed to celebrate another of Kentucky’s natural resources: an abundance of free time.

Let’s be honest, this season of Top Chef has lacked some of the memorable characters of past seasons. In fairness, there are only so many Chef Fatis in the world (and now there are none, this world is a trash can), but whatever this season has lacked in lovable characters and Gail Simmonses it has attempted to make up for in fickleness and cruelty (don’t try it at home!).

This week was the second time this season that the winner of the previous episode was eliminated. In this case, the competitor in question had only just revealed the hearfelt story of overcoming her father’s suicide. Amazingly, that wasn’t even the cruelest part.

No, that would come when one character, a die-hard Kentucky basketball fan, would be publicly shamed for using “boxed waffle mix” in front of Kentucky coach John Calipari and an arena full of fans, complete with 5,000 people chanting “HOME MADE” until she broke down in tears.

JESUS CHRIST, TOP CHEF. Even as a connoisseur of this show’s bitchiest nitpicks, and as someone who runs a feature here that essentially consists of brutally roasting each other over cooking choices… that was still one of the meanest things I’ve seen on TV. And the fact is, I probably would’ve roasted her for pre-made waffle mix too. So not only was it cruel, I felt complicit. …I’m telling you, this episode was quite a journey.

Sweaty Eddie was coming off his double-bottom finish in last week’s episode where he almost got sent home, but ended up winning the quickfire. Which was a boullion challenge in honor of the gold bullion in Fort Knox, in which the chefs had to cook a dish using only boullion cubes as seasoning. Eddie made a gold caponata with scallops, and for his win received easily the biggest prize of the season — he didn’t even have to cook in the elimination challenge. He just kind of got to hang around, chillin’.

The subplot of this week’s episode was basically Eddie Bueller’s Day Off, where the other contestants ran around the grocery store or kitchen freaking out about what to cook while Eddie just sat there with a glazed look on his face eating an apple, or noodles, or drinking tea. The editors cranked the volume on Eddie’s eating sounds to highlight the contrast which was a nice choice.

But the best part was Eddie hanging out at the press table, happily munching his messy chicken wings, completely oblivious to the fact that he was on the jumbotron.

Bravo

He never noticed either. The entire crowd probably would’ve had to cheer “ED-DIE, ED-DIE” for 20 minutes before he noticed what was happening outside his little bubble. “Oh… ha-ha, guys, real funny,” he’d say, sheepishly flashing his gummy smile. Eddie is the most entertaining person on this show and it’s not close.

2. (+1) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

Did anyone else want to hear more about Eric’s thesis about the uses of boullion cubes in Ghanaian cooking? Subject for another time, I suppose. All I know is that if this competition were being judged by the number of times each contestant had made me say “mmmm” at the screen, Eric would be winning in a landslide. This week he made a chicken lollipop by Frenching a drummette, removing the tendons and pulling the skin up over the meat.

Bravo

Eric described doing this so that the “meat would be encased in the skin” and forgive me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the skin generally go on the outside of the meat? Explanations aside, that looked good as hell and I’m definitely going to try to make that. Eric was finally rewarded for his amazing looking food with a win this week. He only narrowly lost the quickfire as well. He’s on a hot streak, but knowing this season that probably just means he’ll be eliminated in the next episode.

Kelsey and Eric seem to be discovering their own strengths at the same time. Whereas Eric’s strengths are yummy-sounding food and a unique background and set of influences, Kelsey’s strength is creating elegant, adorable little party favors for a party to which the riff raff are definitely NOT invited.

After revealing that she had been a cheerleader this week (torn on whether this reveal is more or less predictable than Justin revealing that he’d been a music promoter last week), Kelsey made a “Kentucky pride” chicken dumpling this week. She served it with those most Kentucky of ingredients, pistou and ponzu. (“Hey, y’all, come an git yer ponzu!” mammy used to yell, her shouts echoing through the holler).

Fine, so Kelsey isn’t so great at geography. Or trivia. In fact this week she shouted “Lamb!” as an answer to a type of food whose name doubles as a synonym for currency. But your girl sure excels at handicrafts. Judge Ed Lee said her dumplings were made as well as his Korean grandma’s, and they did look so perfect that it was hard to believe they didn’t come from a machine.

Oh, also, this week Kelsey revealed that she likes to add an extra boullion cube to her ramen. No wonder she can’t tell when food is too salty! Which reminded me of one of my own Southern friends, a Georgian who I first heard about from his now wife, when she told us how the guy she was dating would take spray butter, spray it on his tongue, and then eat a cube of boullion as a snack. I will never tire of hearing about Southerners’ weird food things.

Justin probably didn’t get enough credit for correctly answering all of this week’s boullion riddles. He proceeded to lose the ensuing challenge thanks to clams that were so salty they made Padma gag. It’s weird, I’ve always wanted to see Padma gag on a salty clam (*tries to nudge ribs, falls off barstool, emits phlegmy laugh that turns into a hacking cough*).

Then Justin led the waffle box lynch mob, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of indignation and leading them in a chant of “Home made!” when Sara revealed that she’d bought pre-made waffle mix. Sara should’ve known better and anyone else would’ve gotten razzed under the same circumstances, but Justin refusing to acknowledge that getting food shamed in front of 5,000 people and the coach of your favorite basketball team might be traumatic was a bit much. Come on, man, is there not a vape flavor that enhances empathy?

I kid, I kid. Justin nearly won the elimination thanks to his bun-less take on the Juicy Lucy, which Justin explained was a Minnesotan invention, a burger patty filled with cheese. Which leads me to my next point: Every food tradition from the upper Midwest is absolute trash. “Here, I made ya da food a my faaamily, it’s a balla prawcessed cheese covered in caanned chili, invented right here in Wiscaansin. Traditionally, we eat it over da trash can wit a spork.”

Adrienne went full “not here to make friends” mode this week, dropping the dime on Sara’s waffle mix to Tom. Which arguably wasn’t as bad a crime as Tom exposing it in front of 5,000 people. But Sara was hurt, and blamed Adrienne, and I do like the idea of Caesar bleeding out on the floor of the Senate and looking up to see this apple-cheeked granola fairy in costume jewelry holding the bloody knife. Imagine getting stabbed in the back by someone who needs help opening jars!

Can we really blame Adrienne? If I was in a waffle-making challenge and I knew the other chef used pre-made waffle mix you better believe I’d be shouting about it. I also enjoyed Adrienne’s curious placation strategy of calling Sara “Mama” to calm her down. This… did not work.

Lost in all this was the fact that the judges said Sara’s fried chicken was better than Adrienne’s. And isn’t that the important thing? For me, the fried chicken is the draw of a chicken and waffles dish. The waffle is more like a disk that the chicken sits on to keep the plate from getting greasy. More of an “eat in an emergency” kind of a thing. The only reason I’m putting Adrienne ahead in these rankings is that I think she’s in Sara’s head now.

My God. This was brutal. One thing we know about Sara is that she’s a super chill good time gal EXCEPT when she feels like she has to represent for Kentucky. At which point the pressure gets to her and she gets reeeal uptight. Girl, or should I say Mama, it is NOT your job to legitimize your region. Trust me on this, I’m from Fresno County.

So this challenge, on the hardwood… at Rupp Arena… in front of 5,000 Kentuckians… with John Calipari, the coach of Sara’s favorite basketball team, as guest judge — was perfectly calibrated to hit Sara’s pressure points. There absolutely could not have been a more humiliating time or method for Sara to get shamed for using pre-made waffle mix.

Pre-made waffle mix?? …Get a rope.

Now, Sara should’ve known better, as a person who has ever watched Top Chef before, let alone a Kentuckian, than to use pre-made waffle mix. I’ve been to Kentucky a handful of times in the past few years and I saw chicken and waffles on virtually every menu, sometimes more than once. To be honest, Kentucky, you people should probably branch out more.

That being said, Sara’s “sin” was compounded by her complete lack of an adequate defense. She sort of hinted at the fact that she just used the pre-made mix as a base to which she added other ingredients — which would’ve been a perfectly acceptable response. But she only brought it up after the fact, not while she was getting reamed for it. Not to mention, when Tom pointedly asked if she’d made a “boxed waffle,” Sara immediately caved, saying “yeah, we got the boxed stuff.”

…Foolishly neglecting to point out that THERE WAS NO BOX INVOLVED AT ANY STAGE! Your honor, I give you exhibit A:

Bravo

Now, I may be just a simple country lawyah, but I do believe that I can tell the difference between a BOX and a BAG. Yo honah I have no foithah questions.

All that drama and for what? If only Sara had had adequate counsel. Her brutal public humiliation overshadowed the fact that her chicken was a big hit. She’s still as in this competition as anyone, but she seems rattled.

As I said at the top, Michelle managed to get eliminated despite winning the last episode with a heartfelt story about overcoming her dad’s suicide. But hey, I guess that’s what she gets for serving ribs without enough char on them. Nice going, IDIOT.

As with Sara, I wonder if something got lost in translation here. Because Michelle talked about how her ribs didn’t seem like they got enough char on them, and then she just served them and the judges complained about the lack of char. I don’t get it, what was stopping her from getting some char? Were there no broilers handy? No blowtorches? Because char is not a problem that takes hours to fix. You got ribs, you got a decent heat source — boom, you got char (Please imagine that I’m using the telestrator to diagram this on screen, like John Madden). Instead, Michelle went home, seemingly because no else committed any particularly egregious food sins.

Whereas most of the rest of the contestants seemed to have trouble when they’d overthink dishes, Michelle’s troubles seemed to happen when she shot from the hip. Michelle is a homework doer, not an improviser. She benefits from preparation. She tried to fly by the seat of her pants twice this episode, making a breezy fried smelt in the quickfire and some blasé ribs in the elimination round, landing in the bottom with both. Turns out Michelle is just not a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants kinda gal. Some of us just have to stay in and study while the cool kids (JUSTIN) are out playing grabass at a swim party. It’s a cruel world.

Good luck on Last Chance Kitchen, Michelle. I can’t wait to see what the next few episodes bring. Mostly because the preview of next week’s show included the soundbite “You will be celebrating the life and career of Muhammad Ali through your dishes” and I absolutely cannot wait to see how the contestants pay homage to a civil rights hero and boxing legend through a zesty crudo. Until next week, folks.

Liam Neeson plays a vengeful snowplow driver named “Nels Coxman” in Cold Pursuit, which is already a hell of a logline. A premise like that writes itself, or so you’d think, envisioning a more phallocentric Taken with improvised snow weaponry, bad guys being stuffed into snow blowers or drowned in ice holes and so forth. “Nels Coxman will fill your crevasse… with DEATH.”

Part of me did want to see a hyper-violent version of the Mr. Plow episode of the Simpsons, complete with awkward geriatric love scenes, but, credit for defying expectations, Cold Pursuit is not that. It’s more like if you took Liam Neeson’s character from Taken (which he has played in virtually every movie since Taken) and stuck him in a European sitcom version of Pulp Fiction where all the humor has been lost in translation. Now it’s just strange characters doing strange things with the vague sense of familiarity; a surreal experience.

Norway’s Hans Petter Moland directs, in a remake of his own 2014 film, Kraftidioten (English title: In Order Of Disappearance), which starred Stellan Skarsgard as “Nils Dickman.” Nils Dickman… Nells Coxman… let’s call the whole thing off. The joke is self-explanatory, and the entire concept of a “plow man” is already sexually euphemistic, but that doesn’t stop Moland from explaining it. “Cocksman, you know what that means right?” asks a lazy veteran cop to his plucky rookie partner as Coxman walks by. “It means a man who is gifted at fornication.”

Say what you will about porn being low brow and hopelessly unpoetic, at least the plot of All That Jizz never ground to a halt while someone explained the entendre of “Peter North.” But See what I did there? is Cold Pursuit’s operating philosophy, half-jokes, fully explained.

Summit/Lionsgate

We meet Coxman after a hard day clearing roads in the fictional ski town of Kehoe, Colorado. His wife, played by the inexplicably A-list Laura Dern, fastens the cufflinks on the French cuffs of Coxman’s shirt, uncharacteristically fancy for a blue-collar old salt like Mr. Fornicator. He’s dressing up because he’s off to receive Kehoe’s “Citizen of the Year Award,” which, sure, I guess people love the plow guy. At the podium, he gives a speech about how he chose the boring life and it’s suited him just fine. No one is that content in life unless their family is about to get murdered, and the unlucky relation turns out to be Coxman’s son, who turns up dead of a heroin overdose. Coxman is adamant that “he wasn’t a druggy.”

So far the film is exactly what you would expect. Our first inkling that it’s something more comes when Mr. and Mrs. Coxman go to identify their son’s body. With their son sitting on the bottom-most morgue shelf, the coroner’s bumbling assistant takes a “comically” long time cranking the slab up to waist level. Is that… oh, I see, it’s a joke. I’m not laughing but I definitely noticed!

Coxman finds out his son has been killed by a platinum blonde mohawked drug crew flunky named “Speedo,” so he goes and kills Speedo, an event which occurs almost as quickly as I’ve related it here. Speedo is the first rung on the way up a ladder that eventually leads to Viking, a corporate-style failson who inherited the business from his father. Viking, played by Tom Bateman in a voice that sounds curiously like he’s doing a Liam Neeson impression, is an overbearing father to a young son, whom he forbids to eat junk food, screaming the offending ingredients on a packaged cookie. “Lecithin! Baking soda!” (Wait, baking soda? What’s wrong with baking soda?)

Summit/Lionsgate

He puts the child on a diet of steak and asparagus for every meal. Again, that’s certainly odd but it’s not really a joke.Cold Pursuit almost seems like a contest to see just how many ostentatious screenwriting choices a filmmaker could squeeze in without discernible benefit.

Let’s see, what other quirky choices have we got… Viking has henchmen who are gay, a rival drug gang of Native Americans to contend with, a backstabbing assassin, and a number of minor characters who all seem to have extemporaneous blowjob anecdotes to relate before getting murdered. Most things tend to devolve into murder and/or blowjobs, and by that I mean someone describing blowjobs that happened somewhere else. It’s a poor man’s Fargo by way of the “me underwears” scene from The Room.

At some point early in Nells Coxman’s journey towards retribution, his wife tells him she’s leaving him and she walks right out the door, never to be seen again. This is the most development any female character gets in Cold Pursuit.

To be fair, Cold Pursuit is rarely boring. You’re never particularly invested, but its shrill unpredictability is like a circus performance. It’s impressive the sheer amount of calories being burned despite the lack of believable characters or compelling situations. It essentially defines the difference between “a story” and “things happening.” By the time the credits roll, about all there is to say is “my, that was eventful.”

We’ve got another brand new episode of the Frotcast for your young supple minds to feed upon. This week, Matt and Vince are joined by the incomparable Ashley Burns who was more than pleased to give some sound parenting advice. Also gracing the Frotquarters were comedians Sal Calanni and Joey Devine. In this episode you’ll hear an incredible discussion about how Liam Neeson once yearned to commit a hate crime, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam once embodied a hate crime, and Steven Seagal once created a musical hate crime with his reggae track “Me Want The Punani.”

Oh, and here is a message from Matt Lieb:

Hello my dear Frot family,

First, Vince and I would like to thank you for your years of loyal and steadfast service as listeners of the Frot. Without our legion of nearly billions of listeners we would be nothing. And without our Patreon donors we would literally be dead. We would be destitute — our clothes in tatters, our bellies distended, and you would be ashamed to greet us on the street. So we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for keeping us alive with your patronage. Never forget that it is YOU that makes America great. And to show our gratitude we have added brand new Patreon tiers for those of you who want to get more from your donations. Check it out here!

After a long week of hurriedly stuffing my face with bad food between screenings, I’m finally back from Sundance. How was this year’s crop of films? Well, it’s a little silly to generalize about so many films, especially when one couldn’t possibly see them all in the space of a week. But of the ones I did see, most were fine, a couple were less than fine, and two blew me away. Certainly, nothing was as bad as Assassination Nation last year, which is… good?

Here’s the rundown:

1. Cold Case Hammarskjöld

Sundance

Mads Brügger’s latest documentary is a bombshell, that’s the only way to describe it. I echo Mike Ryan in wondering why the findings in this movie aren’t front page news around the world. This was a two-hour film — which Mads actually apologized for before the film, and that’s all we’re really asking with long movies, to know that you really tried to make it shorter and couldn’t — where everyone in the audience stayed for the post-film Q&A. That’s unheard of. It’s possibly the only post-film Q&A that I was sorry to see end.

It was obvious as soon as the credits rolled that there’d be a rush to discredit Brügger, and the New York Times has already questioned whether Cold Case Hammarskjöld “revives dubious conspiracy theories,” or that it could lead people to be suspicious of doctors trying to fight AIDS in Africa. Which is certainly a fair concern, but also doesn’t refute the truth of what Brügger found. The author of that piece also quotes a Times review of Brügger’s last movie “questioning whether Brügger was trustworthy,” though the linked piece (a review) doesn’t offer any evidence of it.

In any case, it’s hard to have this debate without spoiling the movie. Needless to say, it’s worth seeing.

2. The Report

Sundance Film Festival

“Is this your homework, Larry?”

Speaking of movies that depict the CIA in nefarious light, there’s Scott Z. Burns’ The Torture Report. Adam Driver plays the Senate staffer who tried to blow the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program in what plays out like The Insider for torture. It’s an edge-of-your-seat thriller about Very Serious Events, but the beauty of it is that even as breathless and as righteously angry as it is, it doesn’t ignore the comedic possibilities of the story. The subplot about the Laurel and Hardy-esque Milo Minderbinders who sold the CIA torture techniques for fun and profit would make a great spinoff. And how can you not love a movie that casts Buffalo Bill as John Brennan?

3. The Pop-Up Magazine Live Show

Okay, I cheated, this one isn’t technically a movie. Pop-Up Magazine does a “live magazine” show featuring stories, music, and performances. It’s non-fiction storytelling using every basically medium available — audio, video, photographs, animations, songs. Sometimes you get to see the characters from the stories right there in front of you! It’s kind of like when you’re reading a book about a place and you go to Google it to look at pictures and video from there, except they do it for you. It’s a great format — better than comedy, better than film, better than theater. I laughed, I cried, I got to enjoy it with an adult beverage. And it was only 90 minutes. They’re in New York and DC this week.

4. I Am Mother

Sundance

One of the many Australian films playing this year’s fest, you wouldn’t be able to identify I Am Mother‘s country of origin by the accents. It’s set in the days after an “extinction event” inside an automated bunker where the last human on Earth (Clara Rugaard) is being raised by an iPod-faced robot named “Mother,” voiced by Emily Blunt. But is she the last human on Earth?? Directed by commercial director Grant Sputore, it’s an indie that looks like it cost $60 million, and they’re not just empty calories. It’s a smart, sleek sci-fi with very little wasted energy.

5. Official Secrets

Sundance

Yet another movie about intelligence service malfeasance! I’m sensing a theme here! Directed by Gavin Hood (Ender’s Game, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Official Secrets is about yet another whistleblower, this time British, a GCHQ translator who leaked a memo about a US/UK joint operation in which the NSA would spy on UN Security Council members in order to find information to use to blackmail them into supporting the Iraq War. It’s kind of a lighter, more sugary version of The Report, which lacks some of The Report‘s humor and acting chops (Keira Knightley is no Adam Driver, unfortunately). Though it does have a delightful scene featuring Ralph Fiennes giving the most restrained, British version of “f*ck off and die” imaginable.

6. Big Time Adolescence

Sundance

Big Time Adolescence is a coming-of-age dramedy that’s somewhat festival conventional, hitting all those coming-of-age touchstones you expect, but still a pleasant, breezy watch with plenty of solid comedic moments. The lead and his love interest don’t quite have the acting range to differentiate this movie from similar ones, but if nothing else it’s a breakout turn for Pete Davidson, whose abilities clearly go beyond stand up and sketch. He’s wonderful as the sad, self-destructive clown. I hope he figures his shit out, because he’s a lot more interesting than most sketch-performers-turned-actors.

7. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile

Sundance

This take on Ted Bundy from the director of The Ted Bundy Tapes is plenty entertaining and beautifully shot, but (as I wrote) I can’t help but wondering if there was… more? I mean sure Ted Bundy did a great job charming people and conning them into thinking he was normal, but this movie goes so far as to make you wonder if he was even guilty at times. It’s an interesting summary that doesn’t quite go deep enough.

8. Top End Wedding

Sundance

This is essentially a Big Fat Greek Wedding for indigenous actress Miranda Tapsell, born and bred in Australia’s Northern Territory. As a rom-com, Top End Wedding is fairly broad and corny, but it has the benefit of depicting some truly interesting people and places that you don’t normally see on film. For me it was worth it for that alone.

9. Brittany Runs A Marathon

Sundance

Another imperfect dramedy that if nothing else proves its star is capable of bigger and better things. Jillian Bell is a delight as the eponymous Brittany, a self-loathing party girl who starts to find meaning in distance running, as is Utkarsh Ambudkar, playing her some time love interest, Jern. It’s all a little broad though, and it’s hard to fully celebrate a movie about body issues that expects you to unironically celebrate its protagonist achieving her dream of working in… uh… advertising. I mean where do you think body issues come from? You can’t just leave that plotline out there, uninterrogated. Come on, man.

10. The Nightingale

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

From The Babadook director Jennifer Kent comes this tale of colonialism and revenge set in 1820s Tasmania. There’s a lot to like in The Nightingale, from Aisling Franciosi’s gorgeous, haunting singing voice (she’s “the nightingale” of the title) to the sheer degree of difficulty of Kent shooting an entire scene in Gaelic and another in Palawa kani. It’s admirable filmmaking on just about every level, beautifully made and true to its setting. The only real knock on it is that it’s unrelentingly grim to the point of being nightmarish. Between this and last year’s Sweet Country, you could have a perfect “Please Don’t Make Me Watch That Again” double feature about Australia’s colonial period. The Nightingale is a movie you should watch, but I doubt you’ll enjoy the experience.

11. Velvet Buzzsaw

Netflix

Dan Gilroy started making a satire about the art world and then apparently discovered horror movies halfway through. Velvet Buzzsaw is kind of like an R-rated Scooby Doo episode where Gilroy just lets his actors have all the scenery they can chew. It’s fun to watch Jake Gyllenhaal and company just sort of go nuts, but I wish the movie had followed through on some of its weirdness.

12. After The Wedding

Sundance

Starring Michelle Williams, Julianne Moore, and Billy Crudup, After The Wedding is about family secrets and loss, an impressive little French braid of a plot, but in order to fully enjoy it I’d need to know why Michelle Williams’ character spends the entire movie acting put upon. There’s also a third act revelation designed to explain some of the events earlier in the movie that I can’t spoil here, but suffice it to say I hate it. Julianne Moore’s husband directs (Bart Freundlich) and everyone acts super hard.

13. The Sound Of Silence

Sundance

A film starring Peter Sarsgaard and Rashida Jones about a “house tuner” adapted from a short film. The premise is interesting but the “romance” (if one can even call it that) is one of the most bloodless I’ve seen, a movie where pretty much every character acts like sex is something you read about in the New Yorker. This one probably should’ve stayed a short.

14. Native Son

HBO Films

Director Rashid Johson’s contemporary take on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel stars Ashton Sanders from Moonlight as Bigger Parks, who in this version is a punk rock bike messenger who loves Death and Bad Brains and Mozart but hates hip hop. Margaret Qualley from The Leftovers plays the daughter of Parks’ benefactor, a compelling combination of cluelessly sheltered and alluringly wicked. There are a lot of interesting choices but they’re so out there that it’s hard to know what they add up to. The acting is solid from top to bottom (Bill Camp!) but there so much window dressing that Native Son loses the power of its source material. It’s the rare case of a protagonist being too unique.

15. Wounds

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Armie Hammer! Cockroaches! A secret portal! All of these things add up to… Honestly, I’m not really sure, but it was fun for a bit while it lasted. Armie Hammer works as the bartender at a New Orleans dive bar. He breaks up a fight one night and ends up with some creepy college kid’s cell phone, which contains some disturbing pictures. His girlfriend, played by Dakota Johnson, and love interest, Zazie Beetz, also factor into the story. There’s an element of Tom Hardy’s Venom in Armie Hammer’s possibly-possessed bartender, a couple jump scares, and a LOT of cockroaches. It’s intriguingly strange, but ultimately it doesn’t really go anywhere. I can handle a protagonist I don’t quite understand or a story that doesn’t quite wrap up, but not both.

It’s hard to remember now where it was I read that first article on Norwegian black metal back in the ’90s because since then I’ve read and watched everything I could find on the subject. It’s an irresistible story, lurid and somehow equal parts goofy and macabre. Some Norwegian kids got into satanic heavy metal, took it way too far, burnt down ancient churches, put an actual headless suicide corpse on an album cover, and eventually started killing each other. Ahh, the music business!

It’s that story, of Euronymous, the band Mayhem, the record store Hell, Varg Vikernes aka Count Grishnackh, Death, and the whole Norwegian black metal gang, that director Jonas Akerlund (Spun) and his co-writer Dennis Magnusson set out to tell in Lords Of Chaos (adapting from Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book, though they didn’t keep much beyond the title and information from some of the primary source interviews).

The film has apparently been in development for quite some time, and for good reason: the details of this story are unforgettable. It’s hard to hear any of it without wishing it was a movie. At some point in the early ’90s, there was a Norwegian black metal band called “Mayhem.” When its singer, Dead — who used to bury his stage clothes and dig them up before shows so that he could more authentically embody his stage name, and was known to huff a dead bird he kept in a bag — blew his head off with a shotgun one day, his guitarist, Euronymous, took pictures of Dead’s corpse and made it Mayhem’s next album cover. There were other, more lurid rumors as well — about Euronymous eating Dead’s brains, about him making necklaces out of the pieces of Dead’s skull. These were comfortable, middle-class Norwegian kids from stable families who did all this seemingly because they were just really bored. And that’s just the beginning of the story.

The obvious challenge for depicting this kind of material is tone. This story can either be incredibly serious or incredibly goofy — kids who had evil lurking within them all along, or kids who just got way too into a goofy subculture. Akerlund, with Rory Culkin narrating as Euronymous (that’s the Culkin from Waco, not the Culkin from Succession) smartly takes the “Glenn Danzig buying kitty litter” approach to this material.

You can be both disturbed and impressed by the principal characters’ commitment to evil, but that just makes it funnier to see them do the unavoidable normie stuff like buy kitty litter or eat pancakes with mom. One of the underpublicized aspects of this whole story is that most of the Norwegian black metal crew was living with, and largely bankrolled by, their parents, even as they burnt churches, threw raw pig’s heads to their audience (who as depicted in the movie, devoured them), and pledged allegiance to LORD SATAN. Jonas Akerlund, who was the original drummer in the Swedish proto-black metal band Bathory before he became a full-time filmmaker, probably has unique insight into these characters.

Emory Cohen plays the other major player in the story, Varg Vikernes, aka Count Grishnackh. Cohen, who was so perfect as a meathead guido in The Place Beyond The Pines and later as the young version of your grandpa in Brooklyn, is once again completely unrecognizable from previous roles, as the initially pathetic, eventually terrifying Varg Vikernes.

Lords of Chaos‘ take on Vikernes is a novel one, especially as Varg likes to present himself as something of an intellectual anti-Christian Nazi pagan these days. In Akerlund’s telling, Vikernes seems to embody Gore Vidal’s famous take on Teddy Roosevelt: “give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight.”

Varg first arrives as “Christian,” and in mocking Christian’s Scorpions patch, Euronymous seems to create a monster. Akerlund depicts this interaction perfectly, with Culkin’s Euronymous walking up to Cohen’s pear-shaped Christian, poking his Scorpions patch and saying, simply, “Scorpions.” It’s so much worse that he doesn’t need to voice his criticisms to make Christian feel embarrassed for liking them. Christian knows at some level that they’re embarrassing, and making Christian come to this conclusion on his own cuts so much deeper. It’s beautifully done, and says so much about fan culture.

In metal, as in many subcultures, the worst thing one could be was a poseur. It’s a very male post-adolescent thing (and possibly a particularly white male post-adolescent thing) to claim a series of increasingly ridiculous affectations as your identity and then deem anyone else who does it inauthentic. Which is even more pronounced when the subculture in question is death metal. Is there any way to authentically worship death without actually blowing your head off like Dead? It’s the obvious, unspoken question hanging over them at all times, driving them to greater and greater extremes to try to prove something that can never be proven.

It’s the inherent contradiction of their ideology and the constant drive to one-up each other as the most authentic that drives the story forward. Just as in all the other versions of this story, it’s fascinating. Akerlund perhaps could’ve done more to contextualize the saga of Norwegian black metal, to get at exactly why we can’t stop talking about it even 20 years later, but he does an excellent job hitting a tone that suits the material. He also doesn’t follow the story all the way through to now either, when Varg has become a free man and apparently a boring YouTuber (which is somehow both disappointing and fitting).

Still, I was happy to devour everything I could find about the story before, and I still am. To not screw up a story we already know is a feat in itself.

In episode two, we see some of the growing pains of the show. It’s the first episode that’s truly a TV episode, David Chase having originally envisioned The Sopranos as a movie, and we see the show finding its voice. This episode is a bit broad. They telegraph the jokes and ham it up more than they would in future episodes. Television was still a broad, hammy medium in 1999, and episode two has some writing that feels much more sitcom-y than it The Sopranos would eventually come to be — creating the sort of “prestige TV” format that’s now so ingrained.

Despite its slight shtickiness, it’s also an important episode in establishing that these mobsters are operating in a world where their conception of what it is to be a mafia guy (and just a man in general) has been influenced by depictions of mafia guys in pop culture. Mafia figures became movie characters, movie characters influenced later mafia figures (like John Gotti, referenced in the opening scene of this episode), and then Tony and his crew come along at a moment when the movie mafia guy has already sort of eaten the real mafia guy and spat him back out again, to the point that they’re sort of indistinguishable. Plenty of references to the Godfather and Scorsese movies ensue, including a cameo by “Marty” himself. (“Kundun! I liked it.”)

We also talk about Tony’s mom, toxic masculinity, how hard it is to find good help in the mafia, and whether the racism of the characters actually turns into racism of the show itself a little bit in this episode. We revisit our segments, Malapropism Corner and Gabbavafongool, and introduce a brand new one (complete with bumper music), “It’s The 90s.”

Enjoy it, like and subscribe, and leave us a (positive) review on iTunes!

Steven Seagal arrived in Australia this week, to promote his speaking tour, An Evening With Steven Seagal — reportedly set up by the same guy who promoted speaking tours by Charlie Sheen and Arnold Schwarzenegger — the tickets for which reportedly ranged from $69 (nice) to $999. Quite a bargain to hear an addled man in an acre-sized kimono mumble about On Deadly Ground, if you ask me.

The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Moran also interviewed Seagal yesterday and described it as one of the “strangest” interviews he’s done during his 20-year career.

“Moments into the interview, he signalled a young Russian woman to scratch his right shoulder in a spot he clearly couldn’t reach,” Moran wrote. “She appeared to be a masseuse and there was a smell of Deep Heat, as if his shoulder was a trouble area.”

Unclear what this woman’s exact job is, but Seagal has been described as having a large entourage with very specific jobs, including “one man whose job seemed to be to carry a bag of sunglasses for him.”

Seagal also had time to squeeze in an interview about MMA with Submission Radio, in which he defended the recently-suspended Khabib Nurmogomedov for Nurmogomedov’s part in the post-fight brawl with Conor McGregor, apparently doing so in his official capacity as a diplomat:

“Do I condemn [Khabib] for what he did after the fight? No. Even as a diplomat I will say no. If you badmouth someone’s family, their wife, their children, their mother, their father, their country, their religion, all bets are off, and I would have done the same thing.”

An Evening With Steven Seagal debuts Friday night in Sydney and the Platinum Package includes signed memorabilia, an “exclusive event lanyard,” and “the chance to bid” on even more unique memorabilia. We eagerly await the first reviews.

This week on Top Chef: Kentucky, the contestants all piled into their sponsor-provided BMW SUVs for a trip across the river to Nashville, Tennessee, for a country music-themed challenge. It was a challenge designed to celebrate one of Kentucky’s greatest natural resources: that it is near to other states.

In the quickfire challenge, the contestants traveled to the Grand Ol Opry (which roughly translates to “the large opera,” in modern standard English), where they would choose courses (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and prepare dishes based on a big country star‘s concert rider. The “twist” was that we wouldn’t find out who this big star was until after the commercial break! Would it be Reba McEntire, the contestants wondered? “I want to meet Garth Brooks,” exclaimed Michelle.

Turns out the big star was… (*drum roll*) Hunter Hayes! He would help symbolize the fantastic exports of Kentucky, as a native of… uh… Louisiana. Oh, well. At least he’s a huge star right? …Right? I mean I’d never heard of this guy before, but he is definitely a smooth-faced man-boy with anime hair, I can tell you that. At what point did country stars become indistinguishable from Disney Channel stars? I’m not listening to country unless the singer looks like they’ve at least been to rehab. Some fluffy-haired milk boy in a plaid shirt singing about trucks? No thanks.

Then in the elimination challenge, the chefs had to make dishes inspired by a “music memory.” This gave everyone the chance to remind us of songs the show couldn’t afford the rights to.

I kind of wish everyone had to choose royalty-free sound-alike versions of their favorite song and then sing the legally vetted paraphrased versions of the lyrics. You used to ping me on my mo-bile…You used to you used to… Just go all the way and make it a Jackie Jormp-Jomp challenge.

This challenge was judged by Caleb Followill from Kings Of Leon — who was actually a bit of a dick, which was nice. Sidenote: I always thought Caleb Followill sounds like what a basset hound would sound like if you could teach it to sing.

And then there was this guy:

Bravo

Holy. Shit. Pattern baldness ponytail, seventies porn ‘stache, and a cowboy shirt unbuttoned to the navel? Damn, that’s like the greezy dad rock trifecta. Now this guy I’d pay to hear sing some country. This is the face of a man who’s lived on a boat. And probably scored with one of your mom’s friends there. (Factual note: this is Nashville restauranteur and James Beard Award Winner Tandy Wilson. Keep on truckin’, Tandy).

Judge Graham Elliot was also there, wearing his trademark infuriating white frames and a shiny, sheet metal-patterned bomber jacket, looking like that construction worker who thought he was Michael Jackson from the Simpsons episode.

Bravo

Li-sa it’s your birth-day… It’s your birth-day Li-sa…

Gosh, what a personality. Whatever Bravo is paying him to stand around looking like an eyesore I’ll double it! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the more I promise to stop roasting Graham the more I can’t resist it. Otherwise, this week’s crew of judges — Jonathan Waxman, Sean Brock, and Tandy Wilson — were entertaining and enjoyable. Perhaps not enough to make up for this season’s lack of Gail Simmons, but I wasn’t expecting miracles.

RANKINGS:

Aw, Michelle. I just want to give her a hug. After ripping on Michelle for being boring basically this entire season, she roars to the front of my power rankings this week with a dish that blew the judges away and a story that had everyone in tears. Do you know how dumb I felt crying onto my laptop while watching a cooking show? Damn you, Michelle. Michelle’s new nickname is Pixar because she tells heartfelt stories that make me cry.

The challenge was a dish based on a food memory, and Michelle immediately picked The Beatles, which seemed entirely on brand because who’s a safer, more boring musical choice than The Beatles? It’s the “Jesus and Einstein” of musical selections. And then she told her story, about how she used to always sing it with her dad, who committed suicide when she was 15.

Oh hey did anyone else just swallow their entire tongue?

The best part is, when she presented the dish to the judges, she wasn’t going to volunteer the information. Padma had to dig it out of her when she started tearing up while she was presenting. Then she told the suicide story and everyone cried their dicks off. I don’t even remember what she cooked but Tom said it was the best thing he’d had all season. Tears make the best seasoning.

Michelle may not get drunk and fall down in inner tubes like Sara, or hilariously insult the help like Kelsey, or smoke the dankest weed like Justin, but she’s a class act.

Dammit, just when I thought Eddie had this thing all but locked up he falls flat on his face. Eddie landed in the bottom three in the quickfire, and I assumed it was the fault of the music child and his bizarre tastes. “I thought everything just sort of sat in the same flavor profile,” he said of Eddie’s dish, whatever the hell that means.

Then in the elimination challenge, Eddie chose a song by Cake — “Love You Madly.” Great job, Eddie! That’s right, the Cake appreciator has logged on.

It was a snapper dish based on something he’d cooked for his wife. On two separate occasions, he told the story thusly: “My wife doesn’t like fish, so I made her fish.”

This is why I love Eddie. Helping someone appreciate something they thought they didn’t like is a totally valid love language, but of course Eddie explains it like a malfunctioning robot and then looks confused when people laugh at it. Sadly, the judges eviscerated Eddie’s dish, saying it was “missing texture,” “missing acid,” and “felt like I was eating cereal” (Eddie poached his fish and put puffed rice on the top). It sounded like they gave him credit for his past dishes or else he might’ve gone home.

Two bottom finishes in a row?? What has happened to you, Eddie! When they announced the winners he was so used to winning that he momentarily forgot to step to the side. It was a very Confused Zoolander Tries To Steal Award moment. How did this happen? I have to think Eddie inhaled some bad juju while he was in the car with sickly Adrienne.

Bravo

3. (-1) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

Does Eric belong at number three? I honestly have no idea with this season. Everyone is up and then they’re down. Eric landed in the top three in the quickfire for making… oatmeal. I swear to God. I told you that kid was a little weirdo. Then Eric made some steak and eggs based on “Big Poppa.” Specifically where Biggie raps “A t-bone steak, cheese eggs and Welch’s grape.”

That seemed like a pretty solid idea, even if Eric’s “food memory” was just the literal food from the song. He didn’t land in either the top nor the bottom for that, so… who the hell knows.

Party Mom has been on the verge of going home for the last few episodes but managed top-three finishes in both challenges this week. Thank God the fun one is sticking around for a little longer. Sara was in the top three in the quickfire for her… curried cauliflower? Another strange choice by the music infant, but fine. Then Sara validated him by finishing in the top three again in the elimination challenge.

That was for a dish dedicated to her father and the song he always used to sing, “Jambalaya,” by Hank Williams. Sara probably would’ve had the cutest tearjerker dad moment if Michelle hadn’t swooped in at the last moment and jerked the tears right out from under her. Sorry, Sara.

Oddly, no one pointed out the fact that Sara chose a song called “Jambalaya” and then made gumbo.

Justin admitting that he “used to run a music promotion company” has to be the least surprising revelation in the history of this show. Justin looks like a former club promoter from 50 paces.

Justin landed in the middle in the quickfire and then made the top three in the elimination challenge with his steak and braised cabbage based on “Purple Rain.” That looked good as hell, but he was disqualified because he only made nine plates for the 10 people. Then he told the judges that he “dropped” a plate, when really he just forgot to make one. No consequences for that?? The Weez weasels away again!

Next time just rub some CBD oil on your temples, bro, I hear it helps with short-term memory.

Adrienne opened the show having to stop the car so she could puke, and then went straight into cooking food. Ooh, you made me a cold! Delicious! Waiter? I’ll have the snot plate with extra germs, please. (Yes, cooks almost always work sick because very few of them get sick days or paid time off, so this challenge was very realistic).

Battling her cold, Adrienne apologetically served up a giant disc of raw-looking filet mignon over corn that she had clearly mailed in. The Disney child loved it though because he is indeed peculiar. Gee whiz, mom and dad, thanks for the food, it was totes yummers, do I have to dance again now?

After that Adrienne made a dish based on Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. “Home,” because it reminded her of home. I guess it was okay because she basically fell out of the episode after that. Who knows where Adrienne stands now. It seems like it’s going to come down to whether anyone else has contracted her hollow bone virus. The bird flu, if you will. She did pretty well this episode but I can’t forget that New England “fish taco” disaster from last episode. I’m still furious about it.

Kelsey opened this episode fangirling all over Hunter Hayes. “I’ve been listening to him since I was in high school!” she gushed.

Hold up, isn’t Kelsey 29? Was this kid a singing fetus or what? Isn’t country supposed to be about divorcing your wife or crashing your horse or whatever? What was this kid singing about, falling off the swing set? I don’t want to hear your country song unless it looks like you might knife me over a still.

Anyway, Kelsey ending up serving Lil Fauntleroy some shakshuka, which she should’ve known was a terrible idea just on the face of it. Hmm, what do pretend cowboys in leather wristlets love? Ooh, I know… Israeli food!

To my eyes, it looked like a good dish, but Hunter Cody Colson III turned up his nose at it because, and I’m quoting here, “I’m really cautious about acidic things.”

Aw, did da tomato sauce upset your widdo tummy?? Jesus Christ, this kid would get beat up at a quidditch match.

Kelsey doubled down on bottom three finishes in the elimination challenge with a “pot pie.” Which was actually just a ring of pot pie ingredients surrounding a bowl of gravy. The judges said it was too salty, with Graham pointing out the margarita-like ring of salt around the edge of the plate. Sara would’ve loved it!

Oddly, no one pointed out the more obvious defect, which is that deconstructing a pot pie entirely defeats the purpose of a pot pie. I love chicken pot pie. If I ordered a pot pie and you gave me a plate of dry chicken breast with a some gravy on the side I would scream.

Also, aren’t you a baker? Dammit, Kelsey, get your head in the game! This show needs you!

That’s right, we lost our sweet lil jaunty cap-wearing Jersey Boy this week. Dammit, now who’s going to drool all over the guest judges? David started off badly, stealing all the eggs and going on and on about his omelette technique (I actually like the few times on this show when the chefs get into the specific details of their cooking techniques), only to land in the bottom three.

Turns out the t-shirt model didn’t appreciate David’s goat cheese vinaigrette. I admit, a vinaigrette on top of an omelette sounds pretty weird, but there’s no way I’m just going to blindly trust a guy wearing a leather necklace on matters of taste.

David was basically beat before he started this week, psyched out as soon as he discovered the Whole Foods didn’t have any octopus. And then the clams he bought as a substitute were too big. He spent the entire prep time throwing pots around and being miserable and was too busy throwing a fit to notice his sauce over reducing. And so he went from favorite to eliminated in the space of a few episodes, story of this season.

It was sad to see him go, but then again that’s what he gets for choosing an Incubus song. If you made me listen to that “the sky looks like a backlit canopy” song more than four times in a row I’d sell out my entire family.

]]>https://uproxx.com/life/top-chef-power-rankings-1609/feed/26TopChefHunter.jpg‘Top End Wedding’ Is A Slight Rom-Com But A Rich Pastoral Of Indigenous Australiahttps://uproxx.com/movies/top-end-wedding-review-sundance/
https://uproxx.com/movies/top-end-wedding-review-sundance/#commentsThu, 31 Jan 2019 15:16:58 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401717112

Goalpost Pictures

Every so often you see a movie, and it isn’t a great movie per se, but it’s filled with enough interesting people and places that you don’t entirely mind. A story can be an adventure, sure, but sometimes just being transported to a place and seeing the sights is adventure enough.

Top End Wedding takes place, fittingly enough, in the “top end” of Australia. You know, the part of the Scooby Doo head above the ear, that’s closer to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia than Sydney, that no one ever seems to talk about? Yeah, that part. We tend to think of Australia’s north and interior as a vast, uninhabited place, which is true enough, relatively speaking (Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world), but also comes as news to the people who actually live there.

Top End Wedding begins in 1976, in the Tiwi Islands (just north of the island of Australia and administratively part of the Northern Territory) where a young bride has ditched her traditional wedding ceremony and escaped on her aluminum (AL-yoo-MINI-yum) fishing boat with the entire wedding party chasing behind. Presumably, she’s off to the mainland.

Flash forward to the present, and a young adult aboriginal girl in a business suit is having a wacky mishap with a cruller. She gets powdered sugar all over her nice suit and wouldn’t you know it breaks a heel for good measure. If only she had some Mentos. We soon come to understand that this young professional is the runaway island bride’s daughter, Lauren, played by Miranda Tapsell (an Australian TV star who also co-wrote the script). Lauren is about to be engaged to another young professional, a lanky, tastefully bearded white lawyer named Ned, which is a name that Australian men still have nowadays (Ned is played by Gwilym Lee, Gwilym being a name that Welsh men still have nowadays).

Some wacky stuff happens, everyone’s wacky friends and parents get involved, and there’s a cute Ewok dog that is named Cher even though he’s a boy. Suffice it to say, Ned and Lauren need to visit Lauren’s ancestral homeland before they can get hitched. Top Ending Wedding is a cross-cultural rom-com, and the tone of the humor lands somewhere between My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Crocodile Dundee, and a Mentos commercial. It’s pleasant enough, occasionally worth a chuckle, and always pretty corny.

Which, to be sure, didn’t go over too well with the Sundance audience, conditioned as they are to chest-beating family drama, morose dirges, and kids in Brooklyn figuring stuff out. After a few days of that, Top End Wedding’s story feels about as profound as a knock-knock joke. I counted at least five walkouts in my screening. But Ned and Lauren’s Planes Trains And Automobiles-esque journey takes them from Adelaide to Darwin to Kakadu to Katherine and eventually all the way to the Tiwi Islands. And when’s the last time you saw any of those places on film, or the people who live there? Needless to say, they were beautiful places and quite exotic to an American like me (and probably to most Australians too — I lived in Brisbane for half a year and I’d never even heard of Tiwi). Miranda Tapsell is from Darwin and director Wayne Blair is also indigenous, and grew up in New South Wales.

True, I wish it hadn’t taken them over an hour of screen time to get us back to Tiwi. But surely the novelty of it is worth something. Seeing new places and faces is an underrated draw of a movie, isn’t it? And there’s enough of story in some of the aboriginal actor’s faces alone to make up for some of what the script lacks.

If you’ve seen a rom-com you could probably guess every beat of this one. Yes, there’s a big set piece that takes place in an airport. And as soon as I heard the title I started in with the easy ‘Straya jokes. “Wedding? Thets nawt a Wedding. THIS is a wedding.”

But you don’t see Top End Wedding because of the groundbreaking storytelling. There’s a cultural richness to it, a wonder in the sound of the languages being spoken, and a beauty of place that you won’t find in many movies.

I saw Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw with six or seven different film critics I know at its Sundance premiere this past Sunday, and to a person, we all began the movie with “Velvet Buzzsaw” written at the top of our notebook pages and left with the rest of the page still blank. What do you even say about this strange movie? I didn’t understand what I was watching while I was watching it and I still don’t. I’ve never seen a headscratcher quite like this one.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays an art critic named “Morf,” and if you’re like me and believe Gyllenhaal not getting an Oscar nomination for Nightcrawler is one of the greatest injustices of the century, you’d be thrilled to see him reunited here with his Nightcrawler director, Dan Gilroy. Morf has hunched shoulders, fluid sexuality, a ripped bod (“I do a lot of pilates and Pelaton”) and the uncanny ability to decide whether he loves or hates a piece of art within 10 seconds of seeing it. The opening scene takes place at Art Basel in Miami, which Morf struts into, smirking bitchily as he runs into “Hobobot,” a talking robotic homeless man with a single crutch and eerie glowing blue eyes who asks for change and says things like “I built the railroads,” in his robot hobo voice.

Hobobot is probably Velvet Buzzsaw‘s high point but it’s also representative — whatever else it is, the movie has plenty of delicious comedy nuggets embedded in it (along with craisins, Brazil nuts, thumbtacks, discarded syringes, and pencil shavings). I can’t say I entirely enjoyed Velvet Buzzsaw, but I love the idea of random Netflix users watching it and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Morf has friends and frenemies at the art show, with whom he shares European air kisses of varying sincerity, including Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo), a 70s punk turned gallery owner who used to be in a band called Velvet Buzzsaw but now seems to have an uncanny ability to score the rights to every piece Morf loves (and his reviews can make or break a work, so the movie tells us). There’s also Josephina (Zawe Ashton), Rhodora’s assistant; a now-sober artist who can’t seem to find his voice anymore, played by John Malkovich; and two competing gallery owners played by Toni Collette in a platinum blonde Anna Wintour wig, and Tom Sturridge, in various kerchiefs and ascots that accentuate his preposterously large Adam’s Apple. Sturridge is doing some kind of European accent the whole movie and between the accent and Velvet Buzzsaw‘s muffled sound mix I only understood about a third of his dialogue. If I had waited for the Netflix release I definitely would’ve watched with the subtitles turned on.

The film begins as a kind of semi-satirical comedy, skewering the art world as it depicts the various schemes and power plays between Morf, Rhodora, Josephine, and the others. It’s great at that, and Morf is another wonderfully entertaining role for Gyllenhaal, though one does wonder how many people are versed enough in the world of high-end modern art for some of these jokes to land.

And then about 25 minutes in, Velvet Buzzsaw becomes some kind of R-rated Scooby Doo episode.

An old man in Josephine’s building dies, leaving behind a treasure trove of undiscovered art. It could be a ticket to fame, fortune, and fabulous riches for all of them, only… the art may contain an evil secret? What even is this movie? Think Art School Confidential meets Scooby Doo and you’re not far off.

If Nightcrawler was Gilroy’s acclaimed debut (a true masterpiece, in my opinion), and Roman J. Israel was his flawed sophomore effort (a promising opening with a self-devouring third act), Velvet Buzzsaw is… I don’t know, somewhere between Lou Reed’s unlistenable Metal Machine Music album and Garth Brook’s Chris Gaines phase. The dead artist’s name is “Dease” in the film, and considering the frequency with which they say his name I’m not entirely convinced Velvet Buzzsaw isn’t just an elaborate “DEEZ NUTS” joke. The more I interpret it that way the more I like it.

I don’t know if I liked it but I can’t wait for you to see it.

‘Velvet Buzzsaw’ begins streaming on Netflix on Friday, Feb. 1. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

]]>https://uproxx.com/movies/velvet-buzzsaw-review-netflix/feed/11velvet-buzzsaw-grid-uproxx.jpgPeter Sarsgaard Tunes Houses In ‘The Sound Of Silence,’ A Love Story For People Who Love NPRhttps://uproxx.com/movies/sound-of-silence-review-sundance-peter-sarsgaard-rashida-jones/
https://uproxx.com/movies/sound-of-silence-review-sundance-peter-sarsgaard-rashida-jones/#commentsTue, 29 Jan 2019 17:26:54 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401713151

Sundance

Before The Sound of Silence began, the Sundance festival programmer who introduced it called it “lyrical,” “reflective,” “philosophical” and “boldly quiet.” Immediately I thought to myself “oh no.” Those descriptors all tend to be film festival-ese for “it’s dry but give it a chance,” which isn’t necessarily the first thing you want to hear before a movie.

The Sound Of Silence lived up to its pre-apology. Michael Tyburski’s film, adapted from the short Palimpsest, by Ben Nabors, is a clever, proudly “small” film, a peculiar little story about a “house tuner” named Peter played by Peter Sarsgaard, a music theorist who visits people’s houses and fiddles with their appliances to create a soundscape to optimize their well-being. “I see the problem, your toaster is producing a C flat,” he’ll tell a bemused homeowner, smiling gently as he wraps a radiator joint in lead tape.

It’s scholarly to the point that it’s bloodless, a dowdy tweed jacket of a film.

One of his early clients is a recently separated woman played by Rashida Jones, who seems to have a problem Peter can’t quite lick. So he keeps coming back, trying different things, going to see her work environment. Eventually, we come to realize that she’s the love interest of sorts, more through proximity and process of elimination than chemistry. What else would she be doing in this story? They display affection mostly through the frequency with which they engage in philosophical conversations. He believes the sounds around us shape our feelings. She believes life is all about the choices we make, humans with free will, and environment is only the backdrop.

Yes, I believe I heard an NPR podcast about this, a debate over the existence of free will. Just as the Vikings imagined heaven as an endless series of battles and feasts, it seems there’s a certain brand of NPR listener that imagines the perfect relationship as an extended panel discussion. This is a movie for those people.

Sarsgaard meets with a smiling capitalist one day who has read about Sarsgaard’s work in the New Yorker and says he wants to work with him on ventures to sell “bespoke home environments.” Sarsgaard is moderately horrified, and the idea itself and at the prospect of training consultants to do his work over video chat for customers all over the world. He tells the man his work is “about constancy, not commerce.” This is also the last time anyone in the film references a world beyond New York.

It’s an intriguing premise, lyrical and with an artfully crafted soundscape. Jones and Sarsgaard share stimulating discussions in which they share neither verbal chemistry nor physical touch, and by and large the film seems to be populated by characters who frown slightly when they hear a swear and sleep with v neck sweaters on. It’s dry but not bad if you give it a chance.

The Report is a political thriller about uncovering the CIA’s torture program that plays out like a national security version of Spotlight or The Insider, a taut barnburner that’s explosive without explosions. It’s a movie that largely takes place in the world of government bureaucracy that never forgets the human costs of their policy decisions.

Written and directed by Steven Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z. Burns (Soderbergh also produced), The Report opens with a title card that says “The Torture Report” with the word “torture” quickly redacted. “The Torture Report” would’ve been a cooler title (hey, if BlackKklansman can do creative typography), but in any case it’s the last time the film plays coy.

Adam Driver plays Daniel J. Jones, a Senate staffer who spent five years trying to expose the CIA’s program of torture, er, “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Much of it takes place in courtrooms and boardrooms and offices, but it also doesn’t shirk from the blood, shit, and puke of what “enhanced interrogation” actually looks like. So much of the public debate on the subject involves utilitarian discussions of whether torture produces actionable intelligence, or legal/semantic ones about whether torture is allowed under US law or the Geneva convention. It’s easy to get lost in the drone of ghoulish rationalizations and forget that what we’re talking about is shoving tubes up peoples’ assholes and locking them in coffins until they go crazy as official policy. The Report doesn’t dwell on visual depictions of torture to the point that feels excessive or indulgent, or like it’s fishing for awards, but it offers just enough viscerality to be crystal clear on what this story is really about.

In fact, The Report is not without humor. The two charlatans who sell the torture program to the CIA in the first place, retired Air Force psychologists played by Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith, are like a sadistic Marx brothers duo, convincing the CIA that they have the “special sauce” for interrogations through a series of surreally cruel but anodyne power points — execution orders written in comic sans. They deflect questions about their ridiculous methods with deadpan one-liners, playing off an increasingly exasperated CIA agent played by Maura Tierney.

“I thought your methods were supposed to find the truth,” she demands.

“Yes…” Hodge’s Jim Mitchell carefully explains. “And we found out the truth is that he’s lying.”

I’d happily watch a dark comedy spinoff just about these two, a Catch 22 for the age of corporatized imperial brutality. The Report isn’t that movie, much more concerned as it is with being the Spotlight of torture. And it’s better than Spotlight. The story is bigger, the stakes clearer, and Adam Driver’s labial skillet face is the perfect canvas for the revelation, reserve, and tempered furiousity the role of whistleblower requires. Every Girls hater should be forced to at least acknowledge that the show gave us Adam Driver and show the proper deference. What a gift.

It’s interesting to see this pointed a critique of the national security apparatus in a mainstream Hollywood film, when Hollywood has so long been at worst complicit and at best overly credulous to CIA-backed narratives. The Report is not only a corrective just by its mere existence, it also calls out Zero Dark Thirty by name, for going along with the CIA narrative that interrogators helped obtain the information that led to the Bin Laden assassination. It was a movie with five Oscar nominations that was at best neutral towards torture and extra-judicial assassination. Driver’s Jones makes fun of 24, a schlock show that rests on the notion that beating people up will force them to give up the nuclear codes.

The Report is equally unsparing of Obama administration. It depicts the White House protecting, and even promoting torturers in the CIA because they credited the CIA for killing Bin Laden and winning Obama the election. It portrays Obama staffers stalling the report and dragging their feet on prosecuting anyone, hanging the CIA’s dissenters out to dry in the process, in a naive interpretation of keeping a promise to the electorate be “post-partisan,” during the campaign. It’s all fairly matter of fact, but it’s downright groundbreaking compared to the quasi-Sovietesque personality cult Obama usually inspires among filmmakers (see Barry, Southside With You). It says a lot that The Report cast Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine, a wonderful character actor whose face and voice have only gotten more terrifying with age) as Obama CIA appointee John Brennan.

By contrast, the film does go a bit soft focus on Dianne Feinstein and John McCain. It depicts Feinstein — played by Annette Bening — as hawkish and politically opportunistic at times, but as someone who will hedge and whinge and delay action but ultimately do the right thing (whether she’s too late in doing the right thing The Report leaves slightly up for interpretation). John McCain is offscreen and unmentioned for most of the movie until he gets his Mr. Smith Goes To Washington moment via stock footage at the end, giving a big, heartfelt speech about the immorality of torture in front of the Senate. It might be a little hard to stomach for an otherwise name-naming movie posthumously cosigning McCain’s fake maverick act, but it is a good speech that works in the narrow confines of the movie.

The Report has just enough humor and absurdity and Adam Driver to cut through its justified righteous indignation. It doesn’t sacrifice importance for entertainment, or vice versa. It’s a movie about the power of naming names that isn’t afraid to name names itself, a movie about admitting mistakes in order to change that represents a symbolic act of Hollywood admitting theirs.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (try getting that one right the first time without looking it up) comes through on its implicit promise to be provocative (as one imagines any movie about a serial killer like Ted Bundy would be), but not always in the sense that it provokes thought or reflection. More often it simply makes you wonder if its depiction is responsible.

It’s a portrait of a man with a split personality where one personality is almost never seen, a werewolf movie that shows only the briefest glint of the fangs. It focuses almost entirely on how Ted Bundy, presumptive serial killer, was able to appear outwardly charming — certainly a topic worthy of exploration — but it also feels like it never fully reckons with Ted Bundy’s hatred of women. Such a specific portrait is certainly a choice, but the way it’s done makes you wonder if writer Michael Werwie and director Joe Berlinger were exploring Ted Bundy’s outward appearance of normalcy or if they were actually taken in by it.

Zac Efron, an extremely generous casting on the face of it even before the luxurious roasted turkey tan afforded him by cinematographer Brandon Trost, plays Bundy, the original rock star serial killer, as the movie depicts it (Bundy’s fake cast ruse, which he used to kill two coeds in Washington, shows up in the Silence of The Lambs, along with plenty of other Bundy echoes throughout pop culture). Bundy is said to be responsible for the murders of at least 30 women, none of whom we meet in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile. Instead, Bundy’s relationship with women is told mostly through his courtship of Liz, played by Lily Collins (the other British Lily, the one with the fabulous eyebrows whose father is Phil Collins).

Bundy meets Liz, a single mother, at a Seattle bar, and eventually proposes marriage. He’s sweet to her from the start, the eventual rapist and murderer not pushing her for sex even after she invites him in, and instead rises early to heat the formula and serve the baby Cheerios and make the coffee before Liz even wakes up — all while dressed in her floral kitchen apron! (Does Zac Efron have a ladies-clothing clause in his contract?)

Aw, wasn’t Ted sweet? I mean, we get it, it’s entirely possible for a serial killer to seem like a sweet guy, and Extremely Wicked hammers that point until its wrists get sore. And certainly there’s an alternative extreme that would’ve been just as hackneyed or worse — to depict a serial killer as a monster, to portray him as something other than human to assuage our own revulsion that we share the same synapses as someone capable of such things. Or, it could’ve exploited his crimes for schlock and cheap titillation. To explore a killer’s humanity is not without value, and the degree of difficulty is admittedly high here.

While far from the worst possible take, “serial killers are just like us” still seems a bit facile. Serial killers look just like us, sure, and some can fake it especially well, but there really isn’t something more to Ted’s character than a charismatic and manipulative guy who sometimes commits brutal rapes and murders with no connective tissue in between? That seems to be the point they’re trying to make, but you wonder if they just didn’t look hard enough. Extremely Wicked‘s portrayal yawns with a sense of incompleteness.

There’s also something off-putting about the energy Extremely Wicked spends on all the female court observers swooning over Ted Bundy, to the point that they call him “dreamy” and break into applause when he wins an objection. Extremely Wicked is studiously factual (Berlinger also directed the Ted Bundy Tapes documentary series for Netflix) so it’s not as if that stuff didn’t happen, but if you’re going to show that but not any of the rapes and murders, I think you owe it to us to explore what exactly those women saw in him. (I got a queasy feeling thinking about how much fuel this film would give the “why don’t girls like nice guys” quarters of the incelnet.) Liz pushes away her nice guy coworker, played by Haley Joel Osment, while holding a candle for the man she knows deep down is a rapist, murderer, possible necrophiliac pedophile, Ted. It’d be worth exploring why that is, but the film sort of takes it as self-explanatory.

The casting hurts them a bit in this regard too, despite Zac Efron’s solid work in probably his best role. “What did women see in Ted Bundy” is an open question, but it’s one easily answered with “he looks like Zac Efron,” which doesn’t tell us much about the real Bundy. It also makes the women in Ted Bundy’s life seem shallow and foolish in a way that’s maybe not entirely fair.

There’s a crackling final scene between Efron and Collins that goes some way towards justifying what Berlinger and Werwie are trying to do here, but a movie about Ted Bundy really shouldn’t need the very last scene just to confirm that yes, Ted Bundy was guilty of the crimes he was convicted for. There’s stock footage during the credits, proving that some of the more far fetched parts of the movie really did happen as they were depicted. But in watching those, you wonder if Berlinger and Werwie were so caught up in the facts that they missed some of the story.

The Report, a new film from writer/director Scott Z. Burn, depicting the researcher who worked to name names and expose the gritty details of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Saturday night. Produced by Steven Soderbergh, the film follows Daniel J. Jones, played by Adam Driver, a researcher for the Senate who spent five years leading a team of investigators writing a report on the CIA’s torture program and later fighting for it to be released to the public.

In the film, Jones uncovers the extent of the CIA program, its approval by top officials in the executive branch and in the CIA, the CIA’s attempts to cover up the grisly details of the program, and their PR campaign to try to get ahead of public opinion and justify the program in the court of public opinion.

The film specifically refutes the notion, allegedly put forth by the CIA, that the torture program ever produced any actionable intelligence. The film describes a coordinated publicity campaign by the CIA to convince the public that the program had contributed intelligence that, among other things, led to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

In one scene the film calls out Zero Dark Thirty by name, the 2012 film from director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, for helping to push the faulty narrative that a tortured prisoner gave up valuable information leading to Bin Laden’s courier. In another, Driver as Jones ridicules the TV show 24, and the idea that Jack Bauer could learn about terrorist plots by threatening to stab detainees.

Burns, a frequent Soderbergh collaborator who previously wrote Side Effects, Contagion, and The Informant!, among others, brought out Daniel J. Jones along with the cast during the post-screening Q&A, where Jones received a standing ovation from the audience at the Eccles Center Theater. Annette Bening, who plays Senator Dianne Feinstein in the film, joined Jones and Burns and some of the rest of the cast on stage, where she described meeting Feinstein and attending John McCain’s funeral.

Zero Dark Thirtysparked some debate over its depiction of torture when it was released, but also garnered plenty of awards attention, including Academy Award nominations for best picture, best actress for Jessica Chastain, and best original screenplay (it was also nominated for editing and won the Oscar for sound editing). The film opened with a scene in which a CIA interrogator played by Jason Clarke waterboards a detainee and confines him in a tiny box as Jessica Chastain’s lead (both composite characters) looks on. The prisoner doesn’t actually give up the information until a later scene in which he’s being fed and treated more humanely.

In The Report, which is based in part on the 2007 Vanity Fair article “Rorschach And Awe” by Katherine Eban, Driver-as-Jones repudiates the notion that the information came from a prisoner at all.

The Report depicts Jones’ five-year investigation into the torture program and his subsequent crusade to see the report released to the public. It depicts the Obama administration’s tepid and even hostile response to the report, not wanting to alienate the CIA (who some believe helped get him re-elected in 2012) or push too hard on prosecuting Bush officials for their part in war crimes after promising to be a “post-partisan” candidate during the election. It’s surprisingly pointed in its criticisms of the Obama administration, given the usual soft focus depictions of Obama in early festival films like Barry and Southside With You.

The Report, which also stars John Hamm, Maura Tierney, Jennifer Morrison, and Tim Blake Nelson, was produced by Vice Media. It does not yet have a release date.

There aren’t many subjects about which the world needs two simultaneous documentaries (Fyre Fraud, on Hulu, and Fyre, on Netflix), but the Fyre Fest is one of those things. I watched both and would recommend it to anyone. Hell, I’d probably watch a third. Through it all, we laughed, we got angry, and we met some wonderful characters. Here are some of the characters, both hero and villain, who made it such a compelling watch (and yes, I left out Fyre Fest founder Billy McFarland, who is basically the main character in both).

Ja Rule

Contribution To The Story: For some reason, every tech evangelist needs a hip-hop guy to give him street cred, which is why Will.i.am is always speaking at tech conferences and Common does commercials about the incredible techno future. It’s so perfectly fitting that when an off-brand Zuckerberg was looking for his Will.i.am he found Ja Rule.

Best Moment: Probably a tie between Ja’s favorite toast (“here’s to living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and… Billy? {…f*cking like porn stars}”), which would’ve gotten you jeered at a frat party in 2002, and the conference call moment in Fyre when someone asks “Isn’t that fraud?” and Ja answers “Nah, it’s just, like, false advertising.”

Keith The Crazy Pilot/Voice Of Reason

Contribution: Keith becomes one of Billy McFarland’s fixers in the Bahamas, and we’re first introduced to him as the nutty guy who says he learned to fly with Microsoft flight simulator. He eventually becomes the unlikely voice of reason, who actually camps on the island in a tent to see whether it’s feasible (it isn’t) and comes up with a plan (sleeping on cruise ships) to solve the inherent infrastructure problem. Naturally, he gets fired for not thinking positively enough. (Lots more on the tech world’s cult of “positive thinking” here.)

Delroy The Bartender

Role: Delroy is the bartender at MacDuff’s on Norman’s Cay, the island once owned by Pablo Escobar that Billy McFarland tries to buy but is kept from doing so when he immediately mentions Escobar in the Fyre ads, in violation of his agreement not to. Delroy becomes another of Billy’s local fixers.

As Seen In:Fyre Fraud on Hulu

Contribution: Delroy is easily my favorite character in either documentary. He takes an amused, detached-but-pleasant, “I don’t think you’re gonna pull this off, dog, but I’m happy to see you try” approach to the whole thing. You get the feeling Delroy has seen more than his fair share of assholes like Billy before, and is happy to keep pouring them drinks and nod at their grandiose bullshit if it will make for an interesting story. Delroy is the ultimate everyman hero.

Notable Moment: “Who the f*ck orders two million dollars worth of booze, dawg?”

The “Social Media Strategist” (Vicky Segar)

Contribution: Vicky is there to explain social media strategies and companies and how the influencer marketing game works. I don’t know if I’d quite call her a “villain,” but she’s definitely there to explain things that everyone hates.

Notable Moment: “I think influencers are actually really brave.”

The “Magnum Penis” Girl (Emily Boehm)

Role: Former employee of “Magnises,” the exclusive-debit-card-for-millennials Billy McFarland started before Fyre Fest.

As Seen In:Fyre Fraud

Contribution: Part of the reason I find Fyre Fraud a slightly more enjoyable watch is that it captures the absurdity of it all, and Emily is often the conduit for that, especially in Billy’s origin story. She explains the name Magnises (“mag-KNEE-sis”) as a portmanteau of “magnum” and “penis.”

Contribution: I normally wouldn’t include a media person in a roundup of notable characters, because they are, almost by definition, not characters. But Tolentino does such an amazing job succinctly describing and contextualizing virtually every character and development in the story that she ends up kind of making the movie.

Notable Moment: Just about every description she offers, but especially that Fyre Fest was “a snowball rolling down scam mountain” picking up every flavor of grating huckster along the way.

Contribution: Social media stars mostly exist to infuriate us and make us ask the tough questions, like “what the hell do you even do,” and “why would anyone follow this person?”

A lot of influencers featured in Fyre and Fyre Fraud were that, but “NBA host” (what does that even mean!?) Austin Mills was just so… extra. Why is he there? No one knows, but like a self-fulfilling prophecy he is, constantly present, with his dopey hat perched atop his grown-up milk baby face and Disney Channel hair delivering affectless observations of zero value. “Here I am on a plane. Wow.”

Contribution: Yes, I saved everyone’s favorite for last. Andy King is already a meme (see below) and for good reason. He starts out mildly hateable, as he describes Billy McFarland as a great entrepreneur, but eventually becomes a full character and gains all of our sympathy when he describes going to Bahamian customs fully prepared to offer sexual favors in exchange for Evian water. We should all be lucky enough to have a friend like Andy.

Notable Moment: Obviously, the part where he describes planning to suck dick for water. Oddly he describes taking a long shower and rinsing his mouth out with mouth wash in order to prepare. Isn’t that something you generally do after? In any case, Andy… well, I hesitate to call him a “hero,” but his dedication is truly inspiring.

Let’s be honest, this season of Top Chef hasn’t been as kind to us in terms of well-defined personalities as the last few. So it was a good thing this week that when Eddie, the winner of last week’s challenge, was gifted with the “advantage” of choosing teams for this week’s team challenge (a houseboat party), he managed to stock his own team exclusively with band nerds, teacher’s pets, and theater geeks, while giving the other team nothing but football heroes, party girls, and burnouts.

Oh God, Eddie, what have you done?

It was Chads vs. Dads, and in a party throwing challenge, and I think you can guess how that turned out. This episode had jello shots, hot tubs, and far more nudity promised than basic cable could deliver. I believe Sara, Kelsey, Brian, and guest judge/Kenny Rogers lookalike Captain Lee (from Below Decks in a Bravo cross promo) all expressed a desire and/or a history of getting naked. Hey, pics or it didn’t happen, guys. Is this Top Chef or Top Tease?

Padma didn’t even take the innuendo bait when the chefs kept calling the jello shots “jiggle juice.” In fact, at one point, she took a jello shot and then made this face:

Bravo

Oh, Padma can’t handle her booze now? I seem to remember a slurry night of hors d’ouvres a few episodes ago.

The sour face may have had something to do with the fact that she attempted to CHEW HER JELLO SHOT. That’s not how jello shots work, Padma. The whole point of a jello shot is that you can skip the immense amount of grain alcohol contained in them past your tongue and into your stomach like a pebble across a frozen lake. Sheesh, it’s like she never went to college.

To this face, Sara half-heartedly asked, “Too boozy for ya?”

Somehow I doubt that was the first time Sara has asked that question. But as a viewer, I resent the implication that the jello shots were “too boozy.” You’ll know when the jello shots are “too boozy.” It’s when you can no longer make jello with them. Anything just short of that is perfect.

Eddie did his best to sabotage himself this week, putting himself on the Nerd Team for a party challenge and taking it upon himself to cook Adrienne’s mayo-ass tacos while she went below decks to rest on her fainting couch (more on that later). Even that didn’t work. Eddie is just too clear a front runner. The judges pretended like there was a chance he might go home but we all knew their hearts weren’t in it. Did you also notice how Tom called Eddie’s shrimp cocktail “perfectly cooked” when he was actually eating it but then claimed it was “rubbery” during judges table? I see you, Colicchio.

Most On-Brand Eddie Moment Of The Episode

Did you see Eddie attempt to relate to the partygoers in a personable, hyoo-mon manner? It was wonderful. “Is this your first time on a party boat. …Uh, cool.”

New Line Cinema

I love Eddie. I wish every contestant was Eddie.

2. (even) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

Eric is number two not because he’s a clear favorite, but because everyone else who could potentially fill this spot is either dropping fast (David) or hopelessly streaky (Kelsey, Justin, Sara). Anyway, Eric was on Team Chad this week, cooking up a beer-battered walleye with escoveitch with the rest of his cool friends. In the fried fish battle he seemed to out duel Michelle thanks to his fish being hot — which seemed to be a result of him making the judges wait 20 minutes while he went downstairs to fry his fish in a stove pot, since the boat generator wasn’t strong enough to power a deep fryer. Yes, food is generally hot when you get it right out of the fryer. Did Eric really just get credit for that? I like to think Sara plied them with enough booze that they forgot why Eric’s fish was hotter.

I’m calling Eric number two but not feeling great about it. His food always looks the best but it’s rarely judged that way.

3. (+3) Michelle Minori — AKA: Screen Time. AKA: Who? AKA: Trivia.

Bravo

Most On Brand Michelle Moment Of The Episode:

When Brian was trying to brainstorm theme ideas and wondered aloud, “what do people like to do at parties?” and Michelle offered, “…Trivia?”

Notable Michelle Quote:

“If this challenge is about a party then we’re out of our element.”

Kudos to Michelle for most clearly recognizing her own brand, even if that brand is a half-hearted apology for being boring. Michelle has had consistently decent food all season that always keeps her just off the lead. This week she narrowly lost the fried fish showdown but it seemed like that was mostly because the judges were butthoused on gelatinous Maker’s Mark. Michelle is clearly one of the better chefs, but right now I can’t quite imagine her shrugging her way into the victor’s circle.

Most Heartbreaking Michelle Moment Of The Episode

When Michelle heard Team Chad laughing it up in the lake (literally going down beer-lubed waterslides) and exclaimed sadly “…I want to go swimming,” while cooped up indoors.

Honestly, if anyone on this show can plan a party, it’s Kelsey. Anyone who watched more than five minutes could’ve told you that. How Eddie missed this is beyond me. Kelsey and Sara both played their roles perfectly this week. Kelsey was probably the MVP of her team, taking the lead on personalized miniature grocery bags filled with “Puppy Chow,” which is apparently Southern for some kind of Chex mix/Rice Krispie treat concoction (never let Southerners name your food). Which just goes to show, if you want adorably wrapped party favors that make perfect drunk munchies, go with Kelsey. If you want to get ripshit on Jello shots, Sara is your gal.

Kelsey made “Alabama Oysters” which I was convinced were going to be testicles but in a shocking twist turned out to be actual oysters — served with hot sauce and lemon and, in Kelsey’s case, pickled watermelon rind. The judges loved them, and their favorite part was that they were… cold. Jesus Christ, did everyone on Team Chad get credit for masterminding the weather? “Cold” is a flavor now? What is this, a Coors Light commercial?

I’m shocked Justin didn’t try to put CBD into Kelsey’s party favors. Or maybe he did? Maybe he spiked the food with psilocybin and that’s why the judges all confused temperatures for flavors? If so, nice job, Justin. Justin was essentially Team Chad’s mascot this week, declaring “I know how to throw a party and I own a boat,” at the beginning of the episode, which is one of the most Chad things anyone has ever said. Later he poured beer on the waterslide and dove down it.

If there are more party challenges, Justin is a stone-cold lock for the finals. Judged on food alone… I have no idea where Justin stands. This week he made… a watermelon salad? Which seems kind of dull and obvious but the judges loved it so I guess that’s just the kind of knowledge boat-owning experience will get you.

6. (-3). David Viana — AKA: Maybe. AKA: Superfan. AKA: Mouse.

Bravo

I’d been keeping David in the top five these past weeks based on his strong start winning all the early quickfires, but his descent down the rankings is starting to look terminal. David was on the Nerd Team this week, which is a little unfair because David doesn’t quite seem like a nerd. A choir kid, maybe. I’ve also realized that it’s almost impossible for me to think of David as an adult man. He has grey hair in his beard but I always think of him basically as a 12-year-old boy. I think it’s the sideways cap and youthful glee he gets when meeting famous people.

This week, a partygoer came up to New Jersey-born David and sarcastically asked, “So, are you from Alabama or Tennessee?” Which was either a solid dad joke or a prelude to a hate crime, I’m not sure which.

This week David made a seafood dumpling with a coconut foam that the judges didn’t like because… they wanted it to be a potsticker? It was very confusing. Anyway, I hope David can right the ship and manages to not faint the next time he meets a celebrity.

That Party Mom ended up on the winning team in a party challenge is one of the least surprising developments in the history of this show. Some people you want next to you in a foxhole. Sara is the person I want next to me in a jello shot situation.

Most On-Brand Sara Moment Of The Episode:

“We’re not gonna make 100 jello shots. We’re going to make 300.”

Notable Sara Quote:

ON HER IDEA OF A PARTY: “Most of the time it probably involves me taking my shirt off and runnin’ around.”

Sara made a shrimp roll with ranch sauce this week. She also drank jello shots and put on an inflatable fish and fell down. I love Sara.

8. (-3) Adrienne Wright — AKA: NPR. AKA: Dangles. AKA: Hollow Bones.

Bravo

Boy, Adrienne sure picked a convenient time to be sick this week, didn’t she? I don’t actually think Adrienne was faking it, I just think she has hollow bones, like a bird, and is thus more susceptible to infection. In any case, Adrienne’s cold meant that she skipped out on service and let Eddie cook her tacos, which meant that they were possibly better than they would’ve been otherwise (remember when Brian won a challenge after Eddie cooked his chicken log?), and she skipped out on judges table so they couldn’t criticize her directly.

By the way, this is what Adrienne’s “fish taco” looked like:

Bravo

I am livid.

This is why you don’t let the chef from Maine make the tacos. Is that… a store-bought flour tortilla quadrant topped with a corn and veggie melange? The most infuriating part of this abomination is that not a single judge called her out on it. We got judges over here worrying if the brine made Brian’s porchetta “too hammy” and not one person objected to a “taco” served on a quarter tortilla wedge. My God. Dammit, Padma, didn’t you go to high school in LA? She must’ve been drunk.

Brian finally got got this week and was anyone surprised? Last week he responded to Tom’s admonition to “be yourself” in a foreign language (“Oui, chef”) and this week he further took that message to heart by making a… porchetta inspired by the flavors of the South Pacific. Well done, sir, truly. “This is the dish that best represents me, a white guy from Nashville. I call it ‘Porchetta Gaugin.'”

Brian also thought it’d be a great idea to carve his porchetta while standing in a hot tub. Man, I think… the party guests… are the ones… who are supposed to use the hot tub… Watching poor Brian’s team imagine what a party was supposed to look like was watching the 40 Year Old Virgin describe sex.

giphy

Staying up all night and then standing in a hot tub while serving pork in the 100-degree heat also seemed like a pretty bad idea, health-wise. Though I guess the upside is that you can pee without leaving your station. Of course, Brian was probably so dehydrated by the sun, pork, and hot tub that he wouldn’t have to pee for days.

Oh well, now Brian will have time to go home and nurse his kidney stones. Rest in Power, Droopy Dog Giving A Deposition.

To all of our FilmDrunk Frotcast listeners, we promised you a spinoff, and here it is. To all of our non-FilmDrunk Frotcast listeners, we’d love for you to check out our new podcast venture, Pod Yourself A Gun.

In Pod Yourself A Gun, each week, comedian Matt Lieb and I will be watching and discussing an episode of The Sopranos, the most important television show ever made. In this pilot episode of Pod Yourself A Gun, we discuss the pilot episode of The Sopranos with (former Uproxx) TV critic Alan Sepinwall, who has literally written the book on The Sopranos —The Sopranos Sessions — now available at bookstores everywhere. Imagine the Frotcast, only cleaner, smarter, and much more on topic. Okay, maybe don’t imagine the Frotcast.

In episode one, we explain the New Jersey Italian dialect, dissect every facet of the pilot, from the original Father Phil Intintola, to the objectively terrible Sopranos theme song. It’s just plain awful. It’s barely music. What does “born under a bad sign with a blue moon in your eyes” even mean? Anyway, we hope you enjoy the episode as much as we enjoyed making it. And if you don’t, va fangool.

Subscribe now! And to everyone who has already listened, first of all thank you, and second, now is the time when we could really use your iTunes reviews to help our visibility.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, two competing documentaries about the Fyre Festival hit their respective streaming services this past week. Can you believe it hasn’t even been two years since the Fyre Festival? The Fyre Festival was the Kennedy assassination of the social media age and we all remember where we were when it happened. Online, of course. We were all online.

Hulu’s Fyre Fest documentary, Fyre Fraud, hit first. Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, it debuted Monday of last week, and for sheer entertainment value, it’s the superior of the two. It seems to take a more skeptical view of the whole enterprise, from the Fyre Festival itself to founder Billy McFarland to the entire techno-utopian entrepreneur industrial complex that spawned him.

Whereas the Netflix version, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, directed by Chris Smith, previously of the all-time great documentaryAmerican Movie, feels much more sympathetic to many of the ancillary characters in the drama, the advertisers and programmers who helped plan the festival and develop McFarland’s app (supposedly) in good faith. Fyre Fraud takes a more “if you didn’t know better, you should have” approach, and doesn’t shy away from doling out blame to Billy McFarland’s New York cool-guy enablers.

Both documentaries have their strengths and weaknesses — Fyre Fraud is particularly strong in its depiction of Billy McFarland and the societal forces that spawned him, while Fyre‘s strength is in the specific detail of where the festival itself broke down and who ended up getting burned the worst in the aftermath. Fyre extends perhaps too much empathy to the New York techies and marketing people who helped McFarland advertise and plan the festival, but that same empathy is also extended to the Bahamians, the day-laborers, and lower-level tech workers and all the lasting consequences they faced because a wannabe entrepreneur refused to face reality — this ends up becoming Fyre‘s strength. And in that aspect, it’s stronger than Fyre Fraud.

Of course, there are procedural explanations for how each respective documentary turned out the way it did, and the creators of each have both criticized the ethics of the other. Fyre offers a more insidery view of creating the initial Fyre Fest viral ad campaign, undoubtedly because the filmmakers struck a deal with Jerry Media (which began as the FuckJerry social media accounts) and subsequently had access to all their footage.

Fyre Fraud focuses more on Billy McFarland and his origin story, undoubtedly because they were able to get McFarland to agree to an interview (they also use lots of stock footage from NBC shows, because Hulu owns the rights to them). Smith subsequently called out Furst and Nason for paying McFarland for his interview (McFarland reportedly told SmithFyre Fraud was paying him $250,000, while Furst and Nason say the amount was far less, and knowing McFarland’s history of inflating numbers, that’s probably true) while Furst and Nason call out Fyre in their movie for partnering with Jerry Media, who in their view helped cause the disaster in the first place.

For what it’s worth, McFarland’s participation in Fyre Fraud doesn’t seem to win him any more of a sympathetic depiction. Whereas Jerry Media, by contrast, does seem to get the sweetheart treatment in Fyre — particularly in a section where a commercial director is talking about how Fyre Fest hired all the best people “best models, best video directors, best social media company…” at which point Jerry Media’s logo appears on the screen like an infomercial. (Wait, weren’t those the guys who got famous reposting other people’s memes? Fuck those guys.)

Regardless, neither creator’s hands are entirely clean, and one of the fun aspects of these movies coming out at the same time and being seen by so many people is watching the larger world get interested in the non-fiction storytelling process. If you’ve watched/read True Story or the Journalist And The Murderer or Seymour Hersh’s recent memoir (excellent, btw) or any number of similar works on the subject, you know that telling a true story about bad people almost always involves that kind of moral calculus, of trading some piece of objectivity for a corresponding kernel of access. As Janet Malcolm wrote in the Journalist And The Murderer, the journalist “is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

The beauty of Fyre Fest is that no one got murdered — a bunch of shitheads just lost their money (and some good people too). Fyre Fraud does a better job exploring those shitheads and putting them in a societal context, while Fyre does a better job telling the story of those good people, and reminding us to think of them a little while we’re enjoying the rest of our schadenfreude. It was one thing for McFarland to bilk rich investors who sort of deserved it, that he also stiffed day-laborers (day-laborers!) is the part that’s truly beyond the pale. (Incidentally, there have been a pair of GoFundMe pages set up for some of Fyre Fest’s victims on the islands). The societal context is at least as important though. While it’s fun to think of McFarland as some anomaly, as you can see in Fyre Fraud, it’s clear that he was following an already well-established playbook for fresh-faced tech grifters all along.

Like Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos, McFarland comes from money (parents are real estate developers), went to an expensive private college (Bucknell), and loves to tell apocryphal, self-mythologizing stories that paint him as a precocious entrepreneur (which… when did we collectively decide that this was a good thing?). Early in the film, McFarland explains how in second grade, he sat next to a girl he had a crush on, and fixed her broken crayon. From the first sentence you can tell the story is bullshit, because who has crushes on girls in second grade? And if you have a crush on a girl, wouldn’t you fix her crayon for free, why would you demand money? But as with The Room and Tommy Wiseau, the flawed, fictional story still speaks volumes about its creator. McFarland goes onto say that he programmed the school’s internet-connected typewriters to display a message about his crayon-fixing enterprise, all of which is meant as an origin story about this prodigy capitalist. Now, again, what kids old enough to use internet typewriters are still being bedeviled by broken crayons?

Moreover, what was the actual fix? Is this fix something that could be performed by any kid with access to tape? Even in the midst of McFarland’s fake story that doesn’t stand up to more than three seconds of light scrutiny, we still see that McFarland was entirely focused on marketing, with the actual product secondary to the point that it might not even exist. Even the part where he partnered with Ja Rule for additional street cred is a well-established aspect of startup culture branding. How many times have we seen Will.i.am show up at a tech conference or Common sing the praises of AI? McFarland is just doing the same thing, and it’s perfect that his off-brand knockoff Will.i.am was Ja Rule.

Both movies lay the blame for Fyre Fest on McFarland, but Fyre Fraud seems more aware that Billy is an exemplar, not an outlier. It gives us the crucial background on one of McFarland’s early financial backers, Aubrey McClendon, an oil heir and fracking pioneer (you can read how all that fracking has been working out for his home state) who drove his car into an overpass the day after he was indicted for trying to rig oil prices. Billy trying to will himself to feel emotion over this is a highlight of Fyre Fraud, and at least artistically is worth whatever money they paid him.

In any case, that’s especially important context. How many of these pseudo-philanthropic tech entrepreneurs are actually underwritten by old school robber-baron ghouls? How much of our economy is driven by old money failsons placing bets on new money failsons, leveraging profits gained from tearing commodities from the Earth to create new opportunities conning millennials? This is much bigger than Billy McFarland.

Maybe it’s a little “in conclusion, America is a land of contrasts” to say, but the docs are a complementary experience. Both fill in some important areas the other left blank. And how many tales are so compelling that we’d willingly watch two stories about them back to back? What a story.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

Fyre Fest was one of the most entertaining catastrophes of the social media age, so naturally we have not one, but TWO great documentaries about it — Fyre, on Netflix, and Fyre Fraud, on Hulu. Your friendly FilmDrunk Frotters have helpfully watched both of them and this week we guide you through the particulars. Jessica Sele joins this week. We discuss the societal context of the millennial grifter and of course have plenty of fun dunking on Ja Rule. Why do all tech scammers require a hip hop sidekick?

We also discuss the Oscar nominations, and why our favorite movies, like Sorry To Bother You and If Beale Street Could Talk got snubbed, while movies like Bohemian Rhapsody, which is bad, and A Star Is Born, which is okay but Matt and Jessica hate, got so much love. And of course we finish things off with another… let’s call it “spirited…” edition of Royalty Freestyle in which Matt improvises songs about Somali pilots and having sex in a Latin American nightclub. Enjoy!

The Academy released its list of Oscar nominations this morning, which means it’s time once again for us to come together as a nation to discuss how awful and bad the Academy is. Every year I’m torn between being angry about all the snubs and thinking “what did you expect? The Oscars have never been good.”

Are this year’s bad nominees any worse than usual? Did the Academy’s much-ballyhooed diversity push change anything? These questions are debatable, but the upside of finding fault with the Academy is trying to give some attention to those movies and performances unfairly overlooked.

So here it is, your incomplete list, structured by category and ordered from most to least egregious snub. As always, these opinions are highly objective and entirely correct, please do not @ us.

Best Picture

It is simply baffling how little attention Barry Jenkins’ latest got after Moonlight won Oscars for director, actor, and writing two years ago. Beale Street might even be the better movie.

Sorry To Bother You

It’s probably fitting that my favorite movie this year, which had labor organizing as a major theme, didn’t receive a nomination at the Oscars, which were originally envisioned as a union-busting scheme. To quote Louis B. Mayer: “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”

You could almost imagine one of the bosses in Sorry To Bother You saying that, right?

The Collette and Fisher snubs seem the most egregious, but at least they got it right with Olivia Colman in The Favourite, probably the best acting performance of any gender this year. God, she was magnificent. Blunt stands out as a brilliant performance in a movie that otherwise wasn’t very good.

Best Actor

Snubs
Ethan Hawke in First Reformed (he was also fantastic in Juliet, Naked, which no one saw).

Joaquin Phoenix in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. Again, I’m baffled how this movie didn’t get more love. And yes, it was better than this year’s other overlooked Joaquin Phoenix movie, You Were Never Really Here. But you could basically nominate Joaquin Phoenix every year.

John Cho in Searching. The movie didn’t stick the landing, but Cho was incredible.

Lakeith Stanfield in Sorry To Bother You. I have faith that Lakeith Stanfield, who has crushed everything he’s been in since Short Term 12, will eventually be recognized.

Best Supporting Actor

Snubs
Hugh Grant in Paddington 2. This was EASILY one of the best performances of the year. The best Hugh Grant has ever been.

Brian Tyree Henry in If Beale Street Could Talk. Basically the dramatic version of above, except for the Hugh Grant parts. Henry is another guy who’s so good in everything that I have to assume that he’ll eventually be recognized.

Julian Black Antelope in Hold the Dark. A mesmerizing though somewhat small performance. I want to see this guy in more stuff. (Macon Blair was also brilliant in the same movie and never gets enough credit).

Jonah Hill in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. The kind of performance the academy usually nominates in the kind of movie they usually love. It’s truly strange that it got lost in the shuffle.

Colman Domingo and Michael Beach in If Beale Street Could Talk. Have there ever been two movie dads this cool?

Cinematography

This is probably the most egregious snub of the entire list. If there was no Oscar for cinematography, If Beale Street Could Talk is the kind of movie that would force them to invent the category, that’s how good it is.

First Man (Linus Sandgren)

Visual Effects

Actual NomineesAvengers: Infinity War
Christopher Robin
First Man
Ready Player One
Solo: A Star Wars Story

SnubsAquaman

Did another movie this year take place almost entirely underwater? Was there another movie with the leads riding giant seahorse creatures? Did another movie have an octopus playing drums? I think not.

Category That Should Exist But Doesn’t: Stunts

Winner: Mission Impossible: Fallout. I’d be happy to never hear about Tom Cruise doing his own stunts ever again, but it’s crazy that the kind of insanely high-stakes, collaborative filmmaking that had to come together to create Mission Impossible: Fallout doesn’t get rewarded.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

Amidst all of this, Bert also makes time to cook for his famous friends on his YouTube show Something’s Burning. The show is one part food porn and one part comedians ripping on each other — which made him a damn good candidate to roast me, Vince, and Zach as we attempted to serve up some world class Italian comfort food. Read the recipes and the burns, then come at us with your best. We all brought it in the kitchen this month, so you’d better bring it in the comments.

That line from Risky Business was ringing in my head as I made a mad dash to finish rolling 30-odd sheets of pasta in about an hour’s time for a 50-layer lasagna.

Look, I’m not gonna lie. This recipe is ridiculous to make at home. It’s crazy labor intensive. Rolling the pasta alone is a marathon. But, holy shit is the final product worth the effort.

I woke up today still full from eating a one-inch slice of this motherfucker. I might skip lunch all together today. The savory besciamella sauce mixed with the sharp bolognese delivered in a veritable carb-bomb of fresh pasta, basil, and crispy melted cheese is comfort food turned up to eleven in every way.

I loved it. I dreamt about it. I will make it again… in a year maybe.

Part I

Zach Johnston

You need to let bolognese simmer away for hours, so start here. I’m making a double order of what I’d usually make. That means I start by recreating the Italian flag with the three key ingredients — a soffritto of celery, white onion, and carrot. Yes, I formed it into the Italian flag because at this point in the process I still had enough hubris and energy to do silly shit like that.

Use a wooden spoon to work the beef until it’s completely broken up (see above photo).

Once the beef is browned, add about half-a-bottle of decent Italian red wine and simmer off entirely (until liquid is gone).

Squeeze in a whole tube of thick tomato paste and stir into the meat.

Add two cups of beef broth, a can of tomato sauce, and one cup of milk, stir.

Simmer for at least two hours on the lowest possible heat, stir on occasion.

Done.

Zach Johnston

Part II

Zach Johnston

Um, I cracked four eggs and every single one of them had a double yolk. That’s … weird. Should I buy a lottery ticket?

Anyway, my second step was to make a double order of pasta. So I got four cups of Type 00 wheat flour on my countertop and made it into a white volcano. I started cracking eggs into the little flour bowl. My plan was to use four eggs with two extra yolks but since every yolk was a double, I used four eggs with eight yolks. Go figure.

I used a fork to gently start scrambling the eggs in the middle and slowly started working the flour in until a dough formed. As soon as I had a workable dough, I started kneading. And, goddamn if kneading a bigger dough ball isn’t exponentially harder. I added another egg to the leftover dry bits and flour to integrate all the flour.

I ended up kneading for a good ten minutes until the dough has a nice softness and smoothness without getting sticky. Next, I wrapped it up in cellophane and popped it in the fridge to rest for about an hour.

Zach Johnston

So, yeah, this is why my right shoulder aches to day. I rolled out a shit ton of pasta.

First, I set up my station. I put clean kitchen towels over my whole table and bolted my pasta roller to the end. I cut the pasta ball into eight balls/sections and dusted my work surface with Semolina flour to work the dough.

I rolled out the first ball in the semolina with a rolling pin so that I could start feeding it into the crank machine. And then I worked it until I had five-inch wide sections flattened all the way down to the lowest/thinnest setting on the machine.

Basically, you should be able to see your hand through the dough sheet. So, you have to work gingerly to assure you don’t tear these sheets as you run two foot long sections through the old crank pasta maker. Once I hit five-inches wide, I cut the dough into eight-inch long sheets to fit Vince’s mom’s… I mean, my baking pan.

Repeat until you’ve finished it all. I stacked the pasta sheets on kitchen towels to help them dry a bit and not stick. I saw old ladies in Bologna doing that in a tiny corner pasta shop. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

Zach Johnston

Part III

Zach Johnston

Next, I get my besciamella made. This is a béchamel, plain and simple. I melt a stick of butter into a pot on medium-high heat. I then whisk in three heaping tablespoons of Type 00 flour.

As soon as a roux is formed and starts to brown slightly, I add in a pint of whole fat milk. I slowly pour it in for two reasons. One, I don’t want the cold milk to shock the roux. Two, I need to fully integrate the milk and the roux slowly so it stays silky smooth.

Once you have a nice silky sauce that easily coats a spoon, add in a good pinch of salt and several cranks from the pepper and nutmeg mills. Stir, done.

Zach Johnston

Lastly, I grate some 24-month old parmesan. I grate that fucker right down to the rind, all eight-ounces of it.

Zach Johnston

Part IV

Zach Johnston

So, this part is laborious, to say the least. I set up an assembly station on my kitchen table. I have my bolognese, besciamella, pasta, basil, and cheese all at hand. But, first, I preheat my oven to 350F.

I’m using an eight by eight by four (deep) baking pan. I cover the inside in olive oil and start to build. The bottom layer is pasta sheet, cheese, besciamella, bolognese. Then each layer continuing is pasta sheet, besciamella, bolognese.

Zach Johnston

Quick note, you do not need to pre-boil your pasta sheets. They will cook in the sauces as the lasagna bakes. If you pre-boil these fresh sheets, they’ll turn to mush in the pan.

By the time I get halfway up the pan, I do a middle layer of fresh basil leaves and parmesan as a little nod to Carmela’s famous lasagna in the Sopranos. Then I carry on with pasta, besciamella, bolognese layers.

Zach Johnston

About halfway through, I stand up an eight-inch baking pan to secure the lasagna so that it bakes more evenly and doesn’t drift in the pan. You want it to be secure and solid.

By the time I get to the top, I’ve used 25 sheets of pasta with 25 layers of filling. The last layer is pasta, bolognese, besciamella, and a good layer of parmesan.

I pop the whole thing in the oven and set a timer for 45 minutes. I’m not gonna lie, this is the most nervous I’ve been about a recipe working out in a long, long time. So, I pour myself the remaining half a bottle of that wine.

Zach Johnston

Part V

Zach Johnston

When the timer goes off, I trepidatiously open the oven. And, wow, this is amazing. The top crust is browned perfectly and the sauces are bubbling up around the edges. It smells phenomenal. Like, mouth-watering, spine-tingling, I-think-I-need-to-sit-down good.

I set the pan on a cooling rack and let it sit for ten solid minutes. Once it’s cooled a bit, I use a large flat spatula (the kind you see short order cooks using in a diner) to separate the lasagna from the sides of the baking pan. I gingerly remove the bracing baking pan and use a smaller spatula to free the lasagna from the bottom of the pan.

I take a large plate and lie it on top of the baking pan and, in one move, reverse it so that the lasagna slides out onto the plate. I then take my cutting board and do that same action again so that the cheesy top is topside.

Zach Johnston

And, come on! Look at that brick of happiness! Again, I can’t understate how amazing this thing smells. It’s like walking into an old Italian kitchen after a century of cooking has taken place and you get to sit down next to an old nonna while she asks “why you don’t go to church anymore?” and all you can think about is when you get to eat that lasagna so you’ll say anything to get to that moment.

Zach Johnston

I use a large knife to cut off the first section. I’m serving one-inch slices of this bad motherfucker because I’m not insane. I plate that on it’s side and generously sprinkle that freshly grated parm all over it with a nice basil leaf to finish.

It’s ready.

Zach Johnston

Part VI (EAT)

Zach Johnston

This is the best lasagna I’ve ever had. Sorry, all those places in Italy I’ve eaten lasagna. Sorry New York, Toronto, Rhode Island, Philly, and my mom. This beats them all by a country-fucking-mile.

Almost amazingly, it’s light with each bite. That heft doesn’t really start to hit until you’re at the end. Trust me, it is a filling meal. But cutting one-inch slices means that you’re not getting a crazy amount of pasta and sauce. It’s more the richness of the bolognese and besciamella that add the heft to it.

In the end, it was hard not to go back for seconds. And on a dish that’s gluttony personified, I think it’s a pretty damn good sign that it leaves you wanting more. Like, I’m still thinking about it right now. I’m going to be thinking about this lasagna every time I go to Italy. I’m going to be 90 years old, with a negroni in my hand, telling people about this lasagna.

I mean, look at it! If that’s not comfort food, I don’t know what is, folks.

Zach Johnston

Steve on Zach’s Dish:

I mean… I don’t want to go full Buzzfeed on this (clearly delicious looking and sounding) dish, but two Gifs came immediately to mind.

First, you have this classic:

Universal Pictures

And then you have this highly underrated gem, slightly altered for effect.

A BILLION LAYERS!

And that, in short, is my roast. This is the most dramatic case of someone blatantly ignoring the law of diminishing returns that I have ever witnessed. And that’s saying something, coming from me. My brand is basically “the Rube Goldberg of food” as Vince puts it.

Obviously — and it almost goes without saying — your recipe looks absolutely on point (except, and this may be a question I ask as your editor, rather than a competitor, but did you add a jar of premade pasta sauce? And then try to pawn that off as traditional?). I love that you added fresh basil and would’ve happily seen a few more basil layers. In fact, if you’d done this with a basil layer after every five or so pasta sheets, I would have hopped right back on board. 50 layers in service of an herb is absolutely my jam.

As per usual, your sauce and pasta-making technique are always hard to argue with. If I was hungover or had a cold, I would mow the shit outta this. The problem is, I’d be feeling better by the time it was finally ready.

Not to pile, like… 50 LAYERS onto my burn, but ratios man. Ratios. Think of it this way, if someone chopped this all up on the plate, they’d essentially have stracci (translates to “rags” — torn pasta sheets), with Bolognese. And if they did that, wouldn’t they end up feeling like the dish was under-sauced?

Counterpoint: I have looked at your final photo five times and it’s literally making my mouth water. Maybe 40 layers wouldn’t have had that effect. Maybe it really did need fifty.

Vince on Zach’s Dish:

Zach, first off, kudos for finally working “trepidatiously” into a food roast. Nice attempt at cooking up a 50-syllable word to go with your dish. Secondly, I feel like you’re trying to steal Steve’s “work harder not smarter” crown (it’s an incredibly ornate crown and he looks like an absolute idiot in it). Every single component of this looks on point — a whole tube of paste?? Bold, but daddy lycopene. Still, I question whether it was worth the effort.

It looks good as hell and I would smash, but don’t extra layers just increase the noodle-to-sauce ratio? I mean those are double-yolked layers of fresh pasta, so they’ll probably be nice and rich, so I’ll call more noodle taste a lateral move. Here’s the bigger issue: what’s the best part of lasagna, the thing that makes lasagna lasagna? The crispy cheese on the top, right? Otherwise, it’s just pasta with meat sauce (not a bad thing, but still). And the unintended consequence of all those layers is drastically reducing the crispy cheese layer-to-everything-else ratio. The tell was when you had to lay it on its side. Then the crispy cheese is all the way at one end and you don’t get it in every bite. Granted, you don’t necessarily get crispy cheese in every bite of regular lasagna either, but that’s the promise of regular lasagna. I want to be fooled. I need to believe in the possibility of crispy cheese in every lasagna bite. You can taste that illusion. Don’t kill the lasagna dream, Zach!

Anyway, most of your innovations seem kind of like lateral moves at best, taste-wise, added to create a cooler photo. Is this comfort food or Instagram food? Don’t influencer me, bro!

Bert On Zach’s Dish:

This is clickbait. It’s like “Epic Meal Time Lasagna!” I didn’t know, everything about it is just misleading enough to get me to click on it. You’re like “50 layers of pasta!” and then I was like “Wait, it’s 25 layers of pasta, bechamel, then the sauce, oh, shut the fuck up.”

This all sounds erotic to me because when I watch food, part of it clicks in with my reptilian brain and my dick gets hard. The fucking sheets of pasta got me so excited. You wrote, “You should be able to see your hand on the other side,” and I was like “Are we making lingerie? Oh, fuck. I can’t wait. Ooohh, ‘gently place it down.’ It seems so fragile.”

It’s like I’m reading pornography when you go “layer it” and “you don’t want to cook the pasta, it’ll get way too mushy.” I’m like okay, we don’t want it mushy. We want it hard. We want it firm. And then you go “I’m gonna place this dish on the one side so it doesn’t fall apart.” I had to re-read that twice. Like, hold on, there’s another guy in the room? Wait, what are you talking about? There’s two guys, one girl? What the hell is this?

Lasagna is lasagna. But what’s it like the next day? Like, how hard is this to re-heat? This fucking lasagna has got 50 fucking layers. My microwave’s only gonna get the outside warm and fucking it’ll be ice cold in the center. But, yeah, I wanted that lasagna so bad. I wanted that lasagna on a snowy day in Indianapolis when you’re like, “Fuck, we can’t get outside. Oh, shit, we have 100 layers of lasagna in the refrigerator!”

Here’s what I would do with the lasagna. I would take Epic Meal Time and be like, all right, so one layer’s this, one layer’s this. I’d change every layer but then it would probably taste like dick, so…

STEVE’S PROSCIUTTO AGNOLOTTI EN BRODO

Steve Bramucci

Last summer, in Italy…

That’s right friends! Steve spent August in Italy and if he doesn’t tell every human alive about it every single time Italy, Italian food or the topic of eating in general comes up, did it even really happen?

Anyway… WHEN I WAS IN ITALY THIS SUMMER, I studied the dish Tortellini en Brodo — which is a common Christmas-season pasta course in Emilia Romagna. I took classes to learn how to make it and gorged myself on different varieties for 15 out of 18 consecutive meals (I don’t eat breakfast, for those working out logistics). I also studied the parmesan production process, dove deep on prosciutto curing, and hung around in an attic tasting 50-year old balsamic vinegar. It was a hell of a trip.

The first step was the broth. I used feet and necks but took this photo before adding the necks because I know that feet gross you all out and Vince and Zach need something to help close the gap on this one. If you’re wondering “why feet” in general, that’s where the gelatin is most concentrated. I wanted a broth so deep and rich that you almost had to chew it.

Here’s what else you see (and in some cases don’t see) in the broth:

Olive oil (I toss everything with the heat on high for a few minutes to release flavors).

Parsley stems.

Celery.

Carrots.

Onions.

Garlic.

Steve Bramucci

There it is after a few hours. I let this broth bubble on low overnight. I was also hella vigilant about skimming scum off the top, because I was trying to make something really refined.

You can see the necks and spines now. Let me tell you, crunching them up with a wooden spoon to release marrow is one of the most satisfying things you’ll ever do.

Steve Bramucci

After the broth was ready (add pepper but NO SALT, this dish is in constant danger of being too salty), I strained it through a loose sieve, then a mesh strainer, and finally a milk nut bag. As I said, I wanted something that felt a little more delicate and refined and the amount of extra work to strain broth is measured in single digit minutes.

The Filling

Steve Bramucci

Next to the filling. I wanted prosciutto to be the centerpiece — that’s what traditional tortellini en brodo is stuffed with — but agnolotti are too big for that. It would deliver too much prosciutto at once, which hardly seems possible, but is. I decided to add shreds of four different mushrooms (shitake, hen of the woods, crimini, portobello), spinach, and a little parsley.

You can see my ratios below. Those are insanely thicccccck slices of prosciutto that they sell at the butcher as “ends and corners” for a discount. You can see them in the ingredient pic and should definitely ask about them because they are about 50% cheaper and it’s the exact same product.

Steve Bramucci

Here’s the bit where Zach threatens to take my Italian card or some bullshit (can he do that? On what authority? Does he even know that I SPENT THE SUMMER IN ITALY STUDYING TORTELLINI!): Rather than add the blended mix raw, as is traditional, I braised it in white wine for a few minutes. I did this because the dish is unctuous to the extreme and I needed some wine to cut that and also because I don’t like raw mushrooms and the few minutes that agnolotti cook wouldn’t have left them done enough, in my opinion.

Here’s our mix after being blended, tossed in a hot pan with Game of Thrones wine, refrigerated to get it back to room temp, and mixed with a hearty handful of Parmigiano-Reggiano to bind it together.

Steve Bramucci

The Agnolotti

To the pasta! We’re running long, so I’ll spare those pics, but note that this is an all egg and flour pasta (five parts 00 and one part semolina). There’s no water or oil added. After working it and resting it, I rolled out sheets.

Steve Bramucci

Agnolotti is a simple fold over pasta. You can see that step here, with the stuffing inside. I cut them up and let them Netflix and chill a little.

Steve Bramucci

Brodo (Part 2)

At this point, I went back to the broth. I got it boiling again and added the parmesan rinds you see in the ingredients pic. A few minutes later, I also added fresh carrots, celery, parsley stems, and onions. I didn’t want the veggies cooked way down and you don’t see veggies added back to a brodo in Modena or Bologna, but I like this idea and I’m sticking with it.

I removed the cheese rinds right before I boiled my pasta in the broth, because it would stick to them. At this point, the broth was thick and had a nice little cheese funk, much like Vince’s mom.

Steve Bramucci

Once the agnolotti were almost done, I fished them out and tossed them in a pan with browned butter, white wine, and fresh oregano, just to add a layer (this proved huge, flavor-wise).

Steve Bramucci

Then I recombined everything for plating. Pepper, a few bits of parsley, a cloud of parm and you’re out the door. Notice I never added salt to the whole recipe. Even a pinch would have left the dish too salty. It’s there in the organic stock that I added to my bones and veg, in the cheese, and in the prosciutto.

Steve Bramucci

I’m going to say something honest and straight up. I promise not to say it often. This is the best meal I’ve ever cooked. Period. I’m sure Bert, Zach, and Vince will find plenty to roast me on, but for me it was dead solid perfect.

Zach on Steve’s Dish:

Ho boy, I’m having a hard time finding fault here without getting super bitchy about little things that, in the end, kinda don’t matter. Did you use too many herbs? Maybe. Too many mushrooms? Probably. Chicken feet, again? Of course.

My nitpicks really are little adjusts I’d make to the recipe without taking anything away from what you did. This is more about taking your recipe and looking for a little refinement. It feels like you should really make a consommé of your broth. It needs that crystal clear nature to really shine as a brodo. This is not to say your broth wasn’t delicious. But getting that clarity to the broth would take this whole dish up a whole level. Throw in a couple of beat egg whites and let that slow simmer until all the impurities are gone.

My other issue is with the thickness of your pasta dough. It feels a little thick (something, something Vince’s mom). My rule with any stuffed pasta is to make the dough as thin as possible to the point you can see your hand on the other side. Overall, there feels like a slight imbalance between the heft of the stuffed pasta and thickness of the brodo. In the end, this is an issue of how delicate and lush the pasta/broth becomes. Maybe a little dialing in here would add that extra rush of wow.

That’s all I got.

Vince on Steve’s Dish:

Your honor, let the record show that there is clearly a giant sprig of rosemary sticking out of the stock pot that Steve didn’t mention in his ingredients, as well as what looks like fresh oregano. How many other unnecessary herbs did you sneak in here without telling us, Steve? He’s like an addict now, he tells us he went minimal and traditional because he knows that’s we want to hear but he’s still out snorting fresh dill and dried pine needles behind the barn when no one’s looking and selling the family car for marjoram. Admit you have a problem, Steve! And you added more oregano in the sauteeing step? How much oregano is really in this dish?!

Also, you claim to have “braised the filling in white wine.” Did you mean blanched? Isn’t a braise long and slow? Because your spinach (which is clearly baby spinach — sustained!) looks completely raw. You said the traditional Italian version is raw, but you also said that the traditional Italian version is made with all prosciutto. Which, obviously a cured meat product wouldn’t need additional cooking. Once you add four types of mushrooms and spinach, yeah, you need to cook that shit together (there’s the Steve we know and ridicule), because otherwise, it’s a raw veg pocket. Instead, it looks like you just blanched them. THESE AGNOLOTTI ARE FILLED WITH LIES!

Your pasta dough looks beautiful, though I agree with Zach, probably a little thiccc. That looks like it would be overly dense. Otherwise, great dish, solid concept, and I especially loved the parmesan rind step. And my grandma was supposedly from Emilia Romagna, she used to make me tortellini in brodo when I was sick. So, you know, thanks for the invite, dick.

Bert on Steve’s Dish:

There’s one line in here that I connected with more than anything. First of all, there’s so much beauty to Steve’s dish. But I couldn’t believe any of it because he had a line in that I’ve heard alcoholics say over and over and over again. At the very end, he goes, “And by the way, did I mention I didn’t use any salt?” And I was like, “I’ve said that to my wife … Like, ‘By the way, you know I didn’t drink last night?'” So, all of a sudden, everything’s out the fucking window. I don’t believe any of it. I’m like, this is recovery talk. All you think is I don’t want to touch any other of his dishes because I bet they are salty as fuck. He just probably got salt in everything and forgot it and was like, “Wait, I forgot salt and it’s not that bad! Holy shit! Parmesan rinds do the trick!”

This dish seemed like a fuckin’ dish that was gonna make your house smell like dog pussy. It’s gonna reek of chicken feet and the fucking stock. Also, when Steve’s like, “Smashing those bones with a wooden spoon is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.” I thought, “Oh, cool. Dial it back a tad bit, serial killer.”

I like him showing off that he has a Vitamix. The pasta, yeah… I love that everyone complained about how thick his pasta was. All I wanted to do is just chime in too, “Yeah, man. Pasta’s way too thick.” Like, don’t know what that means, but yeah. Way too thick pasta. I would definitely make that thinner.

I got lost in this meal because I was like, “Wait, what did we make the stock for? Are we boiling our raviolis in the stock or did we just make stock because we’re dating a Vietnamese chick?” I couldn’t figure out what the stock was for. And then the white wine shows up with butter and I’m like, “Wait, what the fuck? What do we…? Hang on.”

And then he plates it and I’m like “Carrots, where the fuck are the carrots?” I tell you what though, the second plating Steve showed, it was like a before and after pic. It’s like that first picture you see of like your wife when it’s January 1st and she’s like “Okay, I’m doing the 21 Day Fix” and you’re like “Okay.” She’s like, “I want to get a picture of me in a bikini” and you’re like “Well, you haven’t worn a bikini in like 10 years. I don’t know if you want to do a bikini.” Then you take another bikini picture after she does the 21 Day Fix and that’s Steve last picture where the parmesan’s on it and the sprigs of parsley, you’re like “Oh, shit. You’re looking good.” She’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I should tell you I’m dating someone else. Bye.”

“Italian comfort food” would seem to be right in my wheelhouse, considering “Italian comfort food” is pretty much my default setting when it comes to cooking (and before they yell at me, yes, I should probably make the distinction Italian-American food here, since I’ve only learned it from family and I don’t Summer in the old country like these #FancyBoyz). Trouble is, I’ve already played all the hits in this competition – ravioli, cacciatore, red sauce gravy, etc. So for one I didn’t want to repeat myself, and for two, half the fun of this competition is teaching yourself something new. Excuse my momentary earnestness here, but I absolutely recommend it. Try a friendly food battle with your friends! I’ve had to teach myself so many new things over the course of this competition just to try to compete with these pricks.

In the interests of not wanting to repeat myself, I heard “comfort food” and thought “meat and potatoes.” And what’s the Italian meat and potatoes if not porchetta and gnocchi? Have you ever smelled pork roasting with rosemary and garlic? That’s about as comforting as it gets, short of heroin (feel free to combine them).

The Meat

Vince Mancini

For my porchetta I used a trimmed pork belly rolled into a meat log, baked until crispy and then sliced. I basically adapted this recipe, by Michael Pirolo, with a few tweaks, and it essentially has four components: The Brine, The Rub, The Bake, and The Sauce.The Brine

Vince Mancini

Ingredients:

4-5 sprigs of rosemary

10 bay leaves

1-2 heads of garlic (smashed)

1/4 cup juniper berries

1.5 tablespoons black peppercorns

1.5 tablespoons fennel pollin

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper

3/4th cup kosher salt

1/8th cup sugar

1 tablespoon honey

Vince Mancini

I simmered all the ingredients together for about 10 minutes to make sure the brine was fully infused. Added the salt, sugar, and honey at the end. I didn’t want to brine it to the point that it would cure, so I took it out after about 15 hours. Charley supervised.

Vince Mancini

The Rub

Vince Mancini

Pretty similar ingredients as the brine

2 tablespoons juniper berries

Tablespoon black peppercorns

Tablespoon fennel pollin

3 sprigs of rosemary

4 garlic cloves

pinch crushed red pepper

pinch of MSG

First I toasted my juniper berries and peppercorns in a pan and then ground them in a spice grinder. Then I smashed and chopped my garlic, minced my rosemary, and mixed everything together. I added some lemon zest because I had a lemon lying around.

The great thing about pork belly is that it’s really fatty so you don’t have to worry much about overcooking it. For the most part, it just gets crispier and crispier on the outside and more and more tender in the meat. I aimed for three hours, but I invited people over and just left it in the oven until they showed up and took it out to rest and start the gnocchi. I ended up cooking it about four hours. The first hour at 400 and 325 after that.

I would turn it periodically to make sure it browned evenly on all sides. I also pierced it all over the outer fat layer with a fork after to make sure the fat underneath could escape and render as much as possible and get super crispy on the outside. I brushed and basted periodically. I cut up some carrots, potatoes, and romanesco cauliflower to put underneath — mostly just to have some tasty fat-dripping vegetables to snack on, but I’m sure they also added some nice flavor, especially in the basting juice.

Vince Mancini

It got reeeeally crunchy on the outside. Mmm.

The Sauce

Vince Mancini

I watched Jonathan Waxman make this Italian salsa verde at the Aspen Food & Wine festival this year and he was super chill about it. Like “just throw whatever herbs you got hanging around in there” so that’s basically what I did.

Chives

Fresh oregano

Sage

Italian Parsley

Garlic cloves

Capers

Juice of half a lemon

Vinegar (I used white wine and sherry, about a tablespoon each)

Olive oil until smooth (at least half a cup)

Salt and pepper to taste (prob a teaspoon of salt)

Pinch of MSG

I just blended them all up in the blender until it was nice and smooth.

The Gnocchi

Vince Mancini

One rule of thumb making gnocchi, the more flour you use, the denser they are. And the wetter your ingredients are, the more flour you have to use to bind it all. So when I’m making gnocchi I try not to add any more water than absolutely necessary. Which is why I use russet potatoes (gnocchis and french fries are the only time I ever use russet potatoes) and bake them instead of boiling. Just wrap ’em in foil and bake directly on the oven rack for about 90 minutes at 350 degrees.

Four big russet potatoes

Four egg yolks

1 cup 00 flour (partly for flouring the work space)

1/3 cup grated parmesan

Vince Mancini

Wait until the potatoes cool, peel them, put them through a potato ricer, and sprinkle with the parmesan. I also add salt and white pepper at this stage. Then I drizzle on the egg yolks, and enough of the flour so that it comes together to make a dough. Season it just short of taste, because the salted water you cook it in will add a little more salt (yes your cooking water should be salty).

It’s very important not to over-knead it or overwork the dough, for the same reason you don’t use a food processor to make mashed potatoes. They get gummy when overworked. A lot of people use ricotta instead of potato so they don’t have to worry about overworking the dough, but first off that’s called a gnudi (they had a “gnocchi battle” on Beat Bobby Flay recently and they both used ricotta which pissed me off to no end), and anyway my grandma always used potatoes and I like the taste better anyway, so suck it, Flay. Just don’t be a bitch, okay? It’s not that hard to not overwork the dough.

Make a big loaf with your dough, then cut off about a two-inch thick slice of it, and roll it against the board like you’re making a snake. When it’s about the diameter of a thumb or Steve’s dick, cut it into little two-inch bites (the length of Steve’s dick). They should look like the little pillows I like to make for my dolls so that they can sleep good.

Vince Mancini

Yes, you could then roll them on a fork or a gnoccheti to add those little ridges, but if you ask me it’s not worth the time. Oh, and put a little cornmeal at the bottom of your sheet tray so they don’t stick. I’ve spent hours making and shaping perfect gnocchi before only to have to throw them out when they got stuck to the tray. That’s a bad day, dog.

The Cook

Vince Mancini

Vince Mancini

Keep a pot of boiling water (salted — not quite sea water salty, you want it a little less salty than regular pasta water, since pasta dough is usually unsalted) on one burner and a pan on medium low with some melted butter on another. The gnocchis will float to the surface when they’re done, at which point you can skim them off with a mesh strainer and add them to your butter pan. Sautee your gnocchi in the butter to add a little texture, and then scoop a little of the cooking water into the butter pan. Cook that a little to make a little butter/gnocchi water reduction sauce. Then add your sauce to that and fold it all together.

Which brings us to…

The Gnocchi Sauce

Vince Mancini

You don’t think I’d serve un-sauced gnocchi, do you? (…they’re actually pretty good with just the butter reduction, but no). Anyway, it’s a very simple sauce.

Butter/Olive oil

1-2 heads of garlic (smashed and chopped)

1 8-ounce pack of white mushrooms, mandolin sliced thin

1 8-ounce pack of crimini mushrooms, mandolin sliced thin

Pinch of black and crushed red pepper

Heavy cream (maybe one cup’s worth) and parmesan (call it a palm full)

Salt and MSG to taste

Vince Mancini

So you get your olive oil and butter going. Melt the butter, and add in your pepper flakes and pepper. Cook until fragrant. Turn the burner down a little and add your garlic. Low and slow for 10-15 until your garlic starts to get golden. Then add in your mushrooms, and mix it all up. Season. It will seem dry at first until the mushrooms release their water. Once they do it will already be pretty saucy, and to that, you just stir in some cream. Let the cream reduce a little. I keep that sauce just warm, and fold it into the gnocchi butter reduction when it’s all ready.

Vince Mancini

It’s Done!

Vince Mancini

Look, I won’t pretend I’m the most artful plater among us, and if I had it to do over again I probably would’ve put some more salsa verde around the edge there, or maybe made a moat of gnocchi, but I had hungry people in my house and people won’t wait long when you can smell a roasting pork belly from three blocks away. And there was a reason I couldn’t do it over again — we ate it all. Yep, that entire log of pork and all of the gnocchi. I had zero leftovers, which should tell you something about how good it was.

The pork is like cracklins on the outside and tender marinated pork on the inside. The tangy herbacious green sauce cuts the richness, and all goes great with soft, pillowy gnocchi with earthy, rich mushrooms. Oh, and I garnished with some chives. Is that enough fucking herbs for you this time, Steve?

Steve on Vince’s Dish:

First off, the fact that I live an hour down the road and didn’t score this invite confirms every microfiction your fans have ever written about us. I’m going to respond like a reasonable adult — by hiding your articles on the site and adding weird errors and confessions into them. Should be fun for all.

Well, Vince, here’s my take: Just like your ex-lovers say, you did a great job handling your meat but didn’t know what to do with the smooth, silky parts. In this case, I’m talking about that dreaded mushroom sauce — which really has no place in this dish and certainly doesn’t add to it. Also, you cut mushrooms like a hospital cafeteria line cook. You might have bought those shits pre-sliced even. Who wants those slabs on their plate? Break them up, mix and match mushroom styles, blend a few with broth to make the sauce more thoroughly mushroomy. Really anything would do.

Honestly, if you had left well enough alone, it would have been hard to beat your meat. It looks so juicy and rich, I think I speak for us all when I say: I would have loved to gobble it up. But then you did the gnocchi, which probably could have been merged, but I’m not sure how, and then the mushroom sauce fucked up your equation.

That green sauce looks fun, though. It seems like the perfect counterbalance for rich pork belly. And I am hugely in favor of all the herbs. Just needed some thought behind the gnocchi. You’ll get to think about it a lot soon, because it’s one of the many random words I’ll add to your articles as an act of revenge.

Zach on Vince’s Dish:

My biggest complaint is the dirty dishwater look of the meat. I’m not doubting it was good, mind you. But, man, if you had just added some pink salt (Prague salt or whatever people want to call it), that meat would have had a beautiful color to it and a little more depth of flavor. Instead, it looks just like the grey meat you’d get in a Russian cafeteria in 1952. Part of the beauty of Italian cooking is, well, beauty.

Salsa verde, eh? Looks a lot like an Italian chimichurri to me. Get out of here with your Fresno green sauce names! This is pedantic, I know. But goddamn it! The name just throws me off. Is this supposed to be a Southwest Italian fusion sort of thing? I know it’s not because it’s clear in the ingredients that your chimichurri has nothing to do with salsa verde. Looks tasty though.

Lastly, the mushroom sauce feels like going for a two-point conversion on the last play of the Super Bowl when you’re already up by 17. Then fumbling and the other team running it back for a touchdown — like, you haven’t lost the game, you just look silly. My two cents, use the fat from your roasting pan to toss (maybe even brown) those gnocchi and tie this whole plate together! Not saying the mushroom sauce doesn’t look creamy and delicious (like your mom last night). It just feels like a missed chance to bring everything into a single thought based around your meat log.

Bert on Vince’s Dish:

Now, to the meal that got me the hardest, and, dude, this speaks to my bro-mouth-breathing, window-licking self, but it was Vince’s “meat and potatoes.” I love how he corrects you guys. He’s like, “I’m sorry. When I think comfort food, I’m thinking meat and potatoes.” And you and Steve are like, “Easy, we get it. We get it.” When we say we’re going out dancing, we’re not really going out dancing. We’re just going to a club where girls are at.

That fucking dish is something I will make. Porchetta, Oh, my God! I was like, “Uh, looks legit.” I was going through this thing going, “yeah, yeah, I’m not brining anything. I’m just gonna fuckin’ cover it with salt.” I look at Vince’s brine and I was like fuuuuck, we’re not just gonna cook it. I wanted to make this for Something’s Burning but there’s no payoff. I’m gonna just be like, “oh, yeah guys, four hours ago I showed up here and started making a porchetta. It’s in the oven. Hey, real quick, let’s make gnocchi.”

It was a beautiful dish, though. I love him taking pictures of all the brine. The fucking dog is in the picture and he was like “Charlie supervised”. I’m like, “Who the fuck is Charlie?” The whole time I’m like, “how come you’re not mentioning Charlie again?” Was Charlie cocaine? Was he cooking while he was on cocaine? And then I cut back and I see two white eyes and I go, “Oh, it’s your Goddamn dog.” Be clear with your words, motherfucker!

Dude, I love that it’s almost like he double talks. “One rule of thumb of baking is the more flour you use, the denser they are. And the lighter your ingredients are, the more flour you have to use to bind it together.” I’m like, just say what you mean to say. I mean, Vince is the most double talking motherfucker. “One rule is the more flour you use the tighter they are. But if you use less flour, then you’re gonna need more flour.” Fuckin’ what? I had no idea what he’s trying to tell me.

I do want to make this and I gotta give him props for talking about someone’s dick. The diameter of Steve’s dick — that was fucking hilarious and made me laugh out loud, followed by “they should look like pillows if you want it just like Steve’s dick.” That was a great one.

Yeah, that was a fuckin’ really interesting dish though. I can make that for my kids. I had no idea they had an Italian salsa verde.

The world got a little worse the day advertisers stopped being Don Draper types impassively manipulating the public for monetary gain while drinking away their guilt, and instead became doe-eyed cultists convinced that they were actually making the world a better place. We all know advertising works, but you’re not supposed to believe it. That snapped into focus again this week with a ginned up supposed controversy over, what else, a woke razor ad.

Did you spend the week trying to avoid this entire idiotic story? You’re not alone, and you’re not wrong. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you for instantly clicking away right now.

This allegedly all started when Proctor and Gamble (the massive multinational conglomerate that owns Gillette) released a two-minute, buzz-word filled ad that could basically be boiled down to “bullying. toxic masculinity. sexual harassment. if you agree that these things are bad, buy a razor.” If you have not seen it, here you go…

(Gillette has clearly taken the Krassenstein/Seth Abramson approach — loudly shouting something obvious and demanding to be applauded for it.)

All of this is basic advertising stuff and wouldn’t be worth mentioning if not for a BIG CONTROVERSY. And so, we learned, people were pissed. News outlets from the AP to the BBC to NPR trumpeted big headlines about how this ad had stirred uproar, provoked backlash, generated controversy, destroyed feminists, and so forth. All of these stories cited random social media accounts of dubious import to support their theses. @a9ri broke down the BBC’s sources here. Meanwhile, NPR embedded in its story this pro-Gilette account of 258 followers, this alleged boycotter with 32 followers, this one with nine followers, and a handful of other no-name randos. Almost all of the stories mentioned Jessica Chastain for some reason (it’s a quirk of the internet that she and Josh Gad always seem to show up in the middle of seemingly unrelated news stories).

There’s no drawback in alleging a controversy where there isn’t one either, because all you have to do is mention a controversy enough times and enough people start to weigh in on it that it gradually becomes one. One of social media’s innovations is that your very own strawman for any argument is just a simple Google or Twitter search away. And since the majority of modern online politics consists entirely of trying to trigger each other, no sooner than we find our strawmen do we become someone else’s.

As long as we’re embedding tweets to prove our points, I think ByYourLogic put it best here:

whenever like, a toothpaste company takes on toxic masculinity I think it's cynical tryhard shit no one will take it seriously, then I see 5 verified guys named Carmine LaGun who do conservative AM radio in NYC declaring that they've bought a Howitzer because of the ad

It seems to be an entirely SEO-generated phenomenon (that’s Search Engine Optimization). The ad used a series of buzzwords that were already popular in order to create a search term-dense, internet-only ad that, as of this writing, has around 17 million views.

Meanwhile, the modern news business works much the same way. Find out what’s already being discussed online and flood the internet with that content. Now that the ad has millions of views, guess what, it’s its own buzzword. Buzzwords create ad, ad becomes buzzword itself, news rushes to generate content containing new buzzword, content drives views to ad, and back around again. The marketing-SEO-industrial complex is a snake that eats itself while slowly constricting us just enough to kill a few brain cells.

In the wake of a ginned up social media event, people both thanked the ad and screamed at it, both under the mistaken assumption that brands can hear. How woke are my tampons? What do these trash can liners tell the world about me? You vote with your dollar, we constantly hear, so what brand represents you the best? Do you want the cigarette for cowboys, the cigarette for laughing society women, or the cigarette for sailors? Think hard, this decision is very important.

People learned early on that drawing a smiley face on a vacuum cleaner or whatever could give it a cute “personality,” in the same sense that putting googly eyes on a potato or eyelashes above your car’s headlights anthropomorphizes it in a way that’s ineffably pleasing to our reptilian brains. It was a fun little joke at first that we all understood, but we did it so much that we eventually believed it. Cliché evolved into unexamined truth.

Advertising has given us irony poisoning on a massive scale. It’s how we eventually evolved from a president who used Fox News as his personal propaganda arm to one who gets most of his news from Fox & Friends, the fluff morning show of his personal propaganda arm. Is it possible that we’re actually dumber than North Korea? Surely not even Kim Jong-Il actually believed he scored five holes in one on his first round of golf.

Perhaps it’s the destiny of anyone who generates hype to eventually believe it, and we seem to be living through our own fitting punishment. It’s time to get cynical before it’s too late.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

Glass sold the promise that it would be both a step forward for M. Night Shyamalan and a return to form. Shyamalan became a breakout director with TheSixth Sense in 1999, before turning in three or four execrable flops in a row culminating with After Earth in 2013, a $130 million dollar, critically panned post-apocalyptic adventure starring Jaden Smith. Yet Shyamalan impressively dodged irrelevance by making two well-received films with the indie small budget horror label Blumhouse in 2015 and 2016 — The Visit and Split. Maybe the key to his success was getting back to thinking small.

Shyamalan and Blumhouse are working together once again on Glass, a sequel to Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense follow-up and his most cultishly popular film, which counts Quentin Tarantino among its notable fans.Glass is also a continuation of Split, so on paper it would promise to fuse old Shyamalan with Blumhouse Shyamalan, forever banishing “the guy who makes awful flops with Will Smith’s son” Shyamalan to a historical footnote.

Glass fuses seemingly disparate Shyamalan incarnations, but probably not in the way he would want. It’s a return to form, but not a step forward. It’s a ponderous exercise in self-justification that displays all of Shyamalan’s considerable filmmaking chops, coupled with his equal and opposite tendency to misread the room. He resurrects his most popular characters only to have them just kinda stand around while others argue about them.

I never loved Unbreakable as much as its devoted fans, but it was a promising ending. Bruce Willis’s David Dunn, everydad superhero, has come into his powers only to discover that Samuel L. Jackson’s brittle super genius, Mr. Glass, actually masterminded the deadly train accident of which Dunn was the only survivor — thereby revealing Dunn as a superhero and himself as Dunn’s supervillain nemesis. Ta-da! Classic Shyamalan twist. And yet… what did it accomplish, really? In a different movie that ending would be the beginning of a third act. It explained why the characters were but not who they were, and in retrospect, it feels like a harbinger.

Glass similarly fails to go forward. Instead of moving on from that Unbreakable ending revelation, where we find out superheroes and villains are real and live among us, Shyamalan spends virtually all of Glass’s running time wrestling with the question of… whether superheroes are real and live among us.

Sarah Paulson plays Dr. Ellie Staple, a government psychiatrist who has captured all three of the principles under one roof — Bruce Willis’ super strong/telepathic vigilante, James McAvoy’s multiple personality serial killer, and Samuel L. Jackson’s weak-boned egghead. The key to capturing them, it turns out, is that McAvoy’s Beast can’t handle bright lights and Dunn’s kryptonite is water. Hmm, are these superhero rules or kitty cat rules? Anyway, Staple says she’s been given three days to convince them that they don’t have special powers, a process that takes up most of the film’s running time.

Why she would need to do this or what purpose it would serve are never adequately articulated. If Dunn believes he’s not super, does he cease being a vigilante? If McAvoy’s “Beast” stops believing he has super strength, does he stop being a serial killer? And would that even matter? He’s already in prison for killing people. If he admits he doesn’t have special powers would we let him out? Who cares?

Yet through it all, Shyamalan still, frustratingly, displays an artisan’s mastery of the process — scenes beautifully composed and blocked, grounded in place and time and with gradually escalating tension — even as the narrative charges off hopelessly up its own butt.

In speech after speech, Sarah Paulson’s character essentially debates the film’s own dramatic conceit. Are superheroes real? Well, that’s sort of… up to the storyteller, isn’t it? It’s debating the self-evident.

When inevitably we find out that superheroes are, indeed, real, in this narrative, there isn’t much time left for Shyamalan to actually do anything with them. Mr. Glass obnoxiously explains superhero tropes to us as they happen and Shyamalan makes a belated case for superheroes’ social value.

Wouldn’t it be great if superheroes were real?Why can’t people believe in magic anymore?

Divorced of a specific religious message (which might be Shyamalan’s true calling, if he’d allow it), this weird paean to the supernatural feels almost like an ode to the power of movie magic, a self-justification. And as anyone who sat through Lady In the Water can attest, there’s nothing quite like being constantly hectored about not suspending your disbelief even as you’re already suspending it. It’s a tautological narrative. “Why should we believe in magic? You should believe in magic because magic is real.”

Shyamalan is an acclaimed director, but seems to want to be treated like a cult leader, and Glass is mostly a lengthy ode to itself. Given the chance to make a superhero movie, Shyamalan has instead made a movie where characters tell us about superheroes.

‘Glass’ opens nationwide on Friday, January 17. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

Welcome to your Top Chef Power Rankings for week seven. “Carne!” was the actual episode title, but here are some additional suggestions:

AKA: Talk Beefy To Me
AKA: Where’s The Beef?
AKA: Waithe Waithe Don’t Tell Me
AKA: Less Frou-Frou More Soul
AKA: Xantham Gum?? …Get A Rope
AKA: Honey They Shrunk The Cow
AKA: It Never Got Beefy Enough For Me
AKA: What Can Brown Do For You

This week, the chefs got to work with legendary Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini, a guy I first heard about when Bill Buford went to work for him in Heat (a wonderful food book). On the show he mostly showed up as the crazy Italian man who constantly shouts “Carne,” and, frankly, I could’ve done without the editing package of six different competitors saying “Carne!” like Dario.

Yeah, yeah, we get it, carne. How much better would it have been if Dario had a bad Italian accent from the twenties? And all of the judging had been done in it? Bran-done: You beef-a so small. Why you make-a Tom-a Colicchio cry?

The fun thing about Italian is that you can ask an Italian how to say a phrase, and then repeat it back to them in the most exaggerated Chef Boyardee accent possible as a joke and they’ll just be like “Yes! A-just-a like-a this!” (*hand motion like holding an invisible hawk by the feet*)

The show also did that thing this week where they give the chefs an absurdly short amount of time to cook a thing and then berate them for not cooking things that take much longer. I can’t believe you didn’t cook me a standing rib roast! For Christ’s sake you had an entire hour!

Actually, the chefs had two hours to butcher AND cook their meat cuts. What the hell? Come on, we watch this show for persnickety judging, not unfair judging (“You call this a gougére, you cretin? What, did your mother give birth in a stable?”).

Before the butchery session, Lena Waithe showed up to guest judge the quickfire, and if we’re being honest, the editing package where the contestants fluff the judge’s resume was a little sad this time. “Oh man, Lena Waithe! She’s killing it right now, she’s been in, uh… Ready Player One…”

You could tell Eric didn’t really want to bring up Ready Player One as Lena’s only credit but he knew it was the most well known (either that or he felt conflicted about the Aziz Ansari controversy when he thought of Master of None — ed). Nonetheless, Lena was game, there to host a hot brown challenge, in which the chefs were tasked with reimagining the hot brown — an open-faced turkey sandwich covered in mornay sauce, made famous by the Brown Hotel in Louisville. That challenge had rules that were nicely specific — has to have turkey, a sauce, and be plated in a skillet. It’s nice when challenges are specific!

Anyway, it feels like the favorites are starting to crystallize. Call your bookie today!

Eddie is really starting to pull away as both the favorite to win the competition and my heart. After the first episode I honestly just assumed that he’d be the easiest to make jokes about. Instead, he’s out there sweating his ass off, his skin making a crinkling sound like aluminum foil every time he has to smile, but it’s really those moments you live for as a viewer, and they seem to be happening more and more often now that he keeps winning.

This week Eddie made a healthy-ish hot brown (some kind of salad with torn sourdough bread?) and some ground brisket wrapped in romaine lettuce. The latter he said was… a glumpky? I thought he said blumpkin but I know that can’t be right.

2. (+1) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports. AKA: Spader.

Bravo

This whole time I’ve been thinking of Eric as the cool guy student council president, but he started off this episode dancing way too hard on Brother Luck’s grave. “Thank God he’s gone, he wasn’t one of us.” Whoa, easy there, James Spader, wasn’t the guy doing exactly what you’re doing one year ago?

That being said, why is Eric ranked so high? I don’t know, call it a hunch. He didn’t land in the top or bottom at all again this episode, but the judges seemed to like his braised jowl dish, and seemed to object mainly to the fact that he made a mousse with his beef tongue. “Those little dots of tongue? Really?” Tom asked derisively, making a dismissive wanking motion with his hand.

Eric’s food has looked consistently good all season, I have to think he’s going to put it all together eventually.

3. (-1). David Viana — AKA: Maybe. AKA: Superfan. AKA: Mouse.

Bravo

David has been a favorite throughout most of this competition but this is his second off week in a row, thanks to a wack tartare that guest judge Nancy Silverton said was like eating raw hamburger meat. I guess that crudo rule doesn’t apply to beef. Also, it’s generally bad when your food looks like Roger Ailes’ genitals. Even worse, David used chipotle in his dish, which he pronounced “chi-POLE-tay.”

Does anyone else feel like East Coast people are deliberately mispronouncing this just to piss me off? Come on, man! Jack in the Box had an entire ad campaign to teach this one! And you’re a chef! After you eat your chi-pole-tay are you going to drink an expresso and head to the liberry?

Is David’s fall a momentary lapse or a sign that he’s circling the drain? Hard to tell, but I’m not quite ready to put The Weez or Hollow Bones in the top three yet so David goes here.

Justin won the quickfire with his “Kentucky Fried Breakfast Brown,” a dish that sounds like a jazz scat cooked by a guy who looks like he does a lot of jazz scatting. I have to give him credit though, that was probably the best-named dish this season, and you have to respect that perfectly symmetrical whale’s eye of a sunnyside up egg he put on top of it.

Bravo

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an egg look like that before. He won that challenge and then asked Lena Waithe for a hug. Oh, you’re gonna be the asks-celebrities-for-hugs guy now? Smh.

Anyway, The Weez followed his hot brown win with a top-three finish in the elimination challenge, cooking up a flank steak that the judges loved and giving him two top-three finishes in a row. Justin is starting to seem like a favorite, but I just can’t assume a consistent performance from a guy who wears a fedora and constantly talks about weed.

Justin seems like if his restaurants go under he could always get a job cooking for Terrence Howard.

5. (+2) Adrienne Wright — AKA: NPR. AKA: Dangles. AKA: Hollow Bones.

Bravo

Plucky Adrienne is still in this competition, landing, like Justin, in the top three of both challenges this episode though she won neither. I don’t know where to put Adrienne. She’s up, she’s down, she has a very nasally voice… She seems like a possibility for the finals as long as she doesn’t have to open any jars.

Oh hey, is Michelle still here? Sorry, Michelle, we weren’t sure if you’d left. Michelle did a braised chuck that the judges called “quite dry” over grits that they said were “coagulated.” Oh well. Braised chuck seems like exactly the kind of dish the judges claimed they wanted this episode, only once they got it realized that you can’t really braise chuck in that short a time.

Anyway, Michelle. What do you say about Michelle? She’s the competitor who eventually murders someone and you think “see, it’s always the quiet ones.”

Kelsey told a fascinating story this week about how she went to France and ate a croque madame and it was very important to her because now she owns a sandwich shop where she sells croques madames.

Tommy Wiseau

Fine, not everyone can do extemporaneous parables like Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abe Lincoln, okay? Kelsey started off rocky in the hot brown round, where she had her vinaigrette ridiculed by Padma. “You call this a sauce, stupid?”

I don’t want to have the whole hot dog/sandwich debate over again, but a vinaigrette does seem like a type of sauce to me…

Anyway, that faux pas landed Kelsey on the bottom for the quickfire but she came roaring back in the elimination challenge to finish… not on the bottom. Good for her. Kelsey seems solidly middle pack at this stage of the competition.

Have you noticed Party Mom turns into Eddie at any mention of Kentucky food? Suddenly her insecurities are plainly on display. She saw Justin hogging the spotlight during the introduction of the hot brown challenge and she just couldn’t handle it. “Ooh, Ooh, pick me! I have a hot brown on my menu too!”

Then she confidently told the cameras “I’m sure I do a better hot brown than Justin,” before attempting to do a scotch egg hot brown that she couldn’t get on the plate in time and was subsequently disqualified (while Justin went on to win). Dammit, Sara, just cheat! What’s going to happen if you put your last scotch egg on the plate two seconds after Padma says “hands up?” You think they’d call the cops? I’m pretty sure it’s fine. We’re making food, not curing childhood diseases.

After undercooking her sausage in the quickfire, Sara doubled down on sausage in the elimination challenge and the same thing happened. Double sausage?? What are you, Abe Fro-ma’am, the sausage queen of Kentucky?

Sara’s sausage casings were too thicc (trust me I know the feeling) and her dish left Padma saying “I’m underwhelmed.”

Sara needs a win, badly, and I hope she gets it because it’s going to get a lot harder to write this when only Adrienne and Michelle are left in the competition.

Has anyone else noticed that Brian sounds like Droopy Dog on quaaludes? Except not slurry or sloppy or anything, just… extremely slow and nasal, like Droopy Dog giving a deposition.

Favorite Moment of This Week’s Show: Tom Colicchio gives Brian what seems like a very important piece of advice when he says “just be yourself.” To which Brian responds, “Oui, chef.”

That’s right, he responded to an admonition to “just be yourself” in a foreign language. That is just (*Dario Cecchini kissing fingers*).

I don’t know how the hell Brian hasn’t gotten eliminated yet. He billed himself as the show’s butcher and in this week’s butchering-centric challenge the reviews he received on his dish included “I’m just confused.” “Over seared on the outside and then raw on the inside.” “I don’t know how you can cook a piece of meat this poorly.”

“I don’t know how you can cook a piece of meat this poorly.” I think if they’d taken into account that it was a butcher cooking a piece of meat this poorly, Brian would’ve gone home. Someone must’ve really blown it to outdo Brian, which brings us to…

Ah, Brandon. To be honest, he never lived up to his initial promise of being this season’s villain, though he does mouth his words like he has to chew them first. Brandon, unfortunately, lived up to one of my iron-clad Top Chef truisms: that once you break out the molecular gastronomy kit, you’re lost. That goes double if you’re only breaking it out to try to salvage something you screwed up, like Brandon this episode.

These were the judges’ faces when Brandon revealed that he’d just xantham gum in his steak tartare sauce:

Bravo

Bravo

Mmm, that’s some good Top Cheffing. Xantham gum!? …Get a rope.

The whole time he was getting dressed down, Brandon infuriatingly never explained the fact that he’d only used xantham gum because the cap fell off his grapeseed oil and ruined his sauce at the last minute. It was like watching early seasons of Lost where three episode arcs could’ve been resolved if only one character would just explain the thing we just saw happen. For this sin, I sentence Brandon to five hours of listening to obnoxious Claire scream Australianly.

Oh well. Adios, Brandon. It seems my punishment for villainizing you is having to try to come up with burns about Michelle.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

Holy hell, gang, can you believe we’ve done 400 episodes of these? What is that, like, 17 straight years of podcasting? It feels like it’s been longer. With that much pod time is it any wonder that one original host has died and another gone into hiding?

Anyway, we didn’t plan a massive, self-indulgent extravaganza episode to celebrate, but it is a pretty damn good episode nonetheless. One of our best, really. We have actual TV star Jake Weisman from Comedy Central’s Corporate (season two premieres tonight!), who joins us to talk about creating the show, the despair of working, and he and I being the first two people on the internet to admit hating Three Billboards. Oh, and about that time he wrestled a heckler on stage and a bag of cocaine fell out of the guy’s pocket.

Comedian, writer, and Thicc Strip pioneer Alison Stevenson also returns, to talk about the high-highs and low-lows of the stand up life, and to yes-and all of Matt Lieb’s jokes. Hooray! You’ll never be lonely when you have the Frotcast.

We’re always on the lookout for a good movie to recreate using only reviews, and Replicas seemed like the perfect candidate. The human clone thriller opened this weekend, and despite starring Keanu Reeves and Alice Eve, it wasn’t screened for critics, so most of the reviews dropped Friday, written by critics catching late Thursday screenings on their own dime.

Not screening for critics isn’t all that weird for a January-February sci-fi thriller — the traditional post-awards season dumping ground that last year gave us 12 Strong, The Commuter, and Den of Thieves, among others — but it doesn’t exactly scream “quality” either.

Replicas was directed by television writer-producer Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who only has a couple other feature directing credits, and was written by Chad St. John, a screenwriter who sounds like a porn star and whose apparent Twitter bio (not verified) describes him as a “male exotic thinker.” He previously wrote Peppermint, in which Jennifer Garner fights MS-13.

Long story short, all signs pointed to Replicas being the kind of movie that’s almost better to have described to you by exasperated critics than actually seen, and thus a perfect candidate for Plot Recreated With Reviews. That’s when we try to piece together the entire plot of a movie using nothing but expository quotes from movie reviews (no analysis!).

I think it turned out pretty well! Here we go…

ACT 1

Replicas Holdings LLC

Keanu Reeves, whose line deliveries have slowed to the point where he sounds like a record being played on the wrong speed [Detroit News]

whose work is conducted at Bionyne, a biomedical research company in Puerto Rico. [Detroit News]

Foster is first seen waiting for a donated brain that is being brought to him via helicopter, cross-cutting between Reeves anxiously staring at his watch and the brain being rushed into the facility. During an operation to place this brain into a robot body, Dr. Foster is asked, “Do you concur?” by a colleague and Reeves cries, “I concur!” [TheWrap]

[Foster] is working on bringing the dead back to life by transferring their neural pathways into synthetic lifeforms — basically, downloading human brains into robot bodies.

He does this by standing around in a room with futuristic headgear on saying things like “boot the mapping service” to his trusty assistant, Ed (“Silicon Valley’s” Thomas Middleditch). [Detroit News]

A male corpse is wheeled into a laboratory. Foster announces to those assembled that the body is dead and that they’re about to transplant his brain into a robot. [THR]

After the procedure is completed, and just before Will can scream “It’s alive!,” the newly revived [THR]

understandably loses its cool when it sees metal hands and legs [RogerEbert.com]

and begins to tear at its own body. [THR]

Lots of yelling and ripping at metal ensues. [RogerEbert.com]

Nevertheless, Foster is encouraged. “This one spoke!” he cries optimistically before going home to his picture-perfect blonde wife Mona (Alice Eve) and their three rambunctious children. [TheWrap]

Her reaction is one for the books. “You can’t just keep bringing people back from the dead until you have this stuff worked out,” she points out, with less urgency than a wife reminding her husband to remember to put the toilet seat down. [THR]

Mona has been given one line of dialogue here about being a doctor, but she looks and behaves like a personal trainer. [TheWrap]

She’s worried that he’s losing his ability to tell right from wrong. Playing God does that to a scientist — makes him a Mad Scientist. He insists we’re all just “chemistry” and “neural pathways.” She’s talking about “the soul.” [RogersMovieNation]

Every line she speaks sounds hastily redubbed, and her re-emergence as a clone [spoiler alert!] betrays no additional unease. [The Verge]

ACT 2

Replicas Holdings LLC

Not long afterward, the couple embark on a road trip with their three young children, improbably heading toward their destination in the middle of a stormy night. [THR]

In no time at all, Reeves’ Foster is taking the corpses home and urging Ed to help him clone them. “I’m not a freakin’ genie here,” Ed says in his usual detached way while Reeves speaks of the “neurofibrillary tangles” of memory. [TheWrap]

Will’s plan is to clone his family members and make identical replicas. [THR]

Foster feigns illness to stay at home and work on his clone family, even though his boss Jones (John Ortiz) is demanding results for their robot-brain project. “I have to watch the pods!” Foster exclaims on the phone to Ed. [TheWrap]

Because he has access to just three incubation pods, Will can only bring back his wife (Alice Eve) and two of his children, which means he also has to scrub away all their memories of the third kid—a pseudoscientific task that this pseudo-movie depicts as a simple click-and-delete process, like Eternal Sunshine by way of iMovie. [AV Club]

Foster sits down and processes the memories of his children and wife in a virtual-reality setting, but all we see are red veins flowing along while we hear innocuous meal-time-like shouts and murmurs. [The Wrap]

[Foster] constructs his homemade cloning station with the help of [Ed], projecting the put-upon indignation one might expect from a coworker sick of being asked to cover a shift. “Well, see you at work,” is his blithe farewell after the experiment succeeds. [AV Club]

The family is dead and gone within 15 minutes of screen time, but the actual clones don’t wake up for around an hour. [TheVerge]

Will asks Ed how the clones are progressing, since they take 17 days to incubate. “They’re a foot taller,” Ed informs him, looking vaguely annoyed at having to give a progress report. [THR]

The clone family is kept in water, and Ed warns Foster that they will age rapidly if they are not released soon. When clone Mona wakes up and things seem fine with her, Ed mutters, “We’re talkin’ Nobel Prize, right?” in his usual non-committed style. [TheWrap]

Will, on the other hand, comes across less like a bereaved mad scientist than a bumbling crook, stealing car batteries from his neighbors to power his basement lab and carrying out text-message conversations with his dead daughter’s friends. [AV Club]

The experiment is successful. Will soon has his family back; well, most of them, with the others’ memories of the youngest daughter conveniently deleted. The two men are naturally thrilled by the results. “Hey, we made clones today!” Ed exults, sounding like he’s finally perfected his recipe for bundt cake. [THR]

But as anyone who has seen mad scientist movies can guess, complications are likely to ensue. Especially since Will’s officious boss (John Ortiz), who [THR]

delivers his lines as if he’s memorized them phonetically [AV Club]

is clearly up to no good. [THR]

It actually comes as a relief when [Ortiz] pops up relatively late in “Replicas” to in effect ask, “Did you really think things would be that freakin’ easy?” [Variety]

Act 3

Replicas Holdings LLC

[Replicas] eventually devolves into tedious thriller tropes, including Will and his family being pursued by bad guys, wearing identical black suits, who look like they’re auditioning for a road company of Reservoir Dogs. [THR]

“Replicas” is also the kind of movie that throws around words like algorithm as if they mean something significant. “We need to get the algorithm!” They might as well have just called it a “doohickey.” [RogerEbert.com]

There are two instances when a needle is plunged directly into an eye on screen [TheWrap]

a third-act reveal that brazenly acknowledges just how silly things have been up to that point. [Variety]

a brief shot of a forlorn Reeves hugging a stuffed pink unicorn that feels like it should be GIFed [RogerEbert.com]

Replicas comes off] like a “Twilight Zone” episode written by frat bros who were half-paying attention while “Minority Report” streamed in the background. [Detroit News]

…less like a science-fiction thriller than some malfunctioning computer’s unconvincing approximation of one. If you woke up in a glitching simulation, this janky garbage would be projected on every screen, possibly under the title Human Movie. [AV Club]

Rarely have characters in a sci-fi movie crossed boundaries of reality and ethics so casually, comically underreacting to every tragedy and miracle. [AV Club]

The script resembles what you might get if you plugged random lines of synopsis from a dozen experiment-gone-awry potboilers into a faulty algorithm. [AV Club]

After what may be one hundred hours, the film does not so much end as it stops, the score’s wrapping-up tone an evident substitute for closure or resolution. [The Guardian]

The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy. [Slant]

—

Boy, that was fun. Is there any actor out there besides Keanu Reeves whose bad movies are almost as fun as his good ones? God bless Keanu.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

People, I think this concept is pretty self-explanatory. We like good food shows. Netflix has some. They keep swapping them in and out which makes it hard to keep this list current, but we’ll do our best. Here are the best cooking shows on Netflix streaming, available right now.

9. Testing The Menu

Testing the Menu is a show shot in New Zealand starring chef Nic Watt, in which he tests out recipes for his Japanese restaurants on the New Zealand public. It’s not the most fast-paced show (New Zealanders have long attention spans, I think they only got electricity a few years ago), and Watt, who’s kind of a dork, cooks a brand of Asian fusion cuisine that may have limited utility in your home kitchen. But the show is pretty great as a slice of New Zealand life. Watt tends to test his recipes on the street in Auckland, and most of the accidental cast of characters is worthy of a Christopher Guest movie. Or at least, a Taika Waititi movie.

8. Avec Eric

Avec Eric is a lot like a Bourdain show, only starring Bourdain’s French buddy who wears beaded bracelets, Eric Ripert. Ripert’s thick French accent doesn’t have quite the same charm as, say, Jacques Pepin, but then, whose does. Ripert doesn’t exactly jump off the screen at you, but he knows his food, so you know he’s not going to eat a lot of bullsh*t or feed us any. Avec Eric doesn’t have quite the flourish of other shows, and Ripert isn’t the most charismatic host alive, but it has a strong mix of exotic food/authoritative host/and pandering-free production. Ripert tends to goes to far-flung places to eat non-snobby food, which is exactly what I want from a food show.

7. Chef’s Table

Chef’s Table is a show produced in-house by Netflix focusing on one famous chef per show. This is really the show for you if you’re obsessed with chefs and fine dining and the sort of mystique of the restaurant industry. For my tastes, it’s a little elite and snobby (I’m the kind of foodie who will take you to a taco truck and refuses to wait in line more than a half hour for anything), and it has way too many talking heads you’ve never heard of whose entire job seems to be looking like an intellectual. It desperately needs an Anthony Bourdain character who despises snobby bullsh*t to cut through some of the fluff. On the plus side, it’s gorgeously shot and features some of the best chefs in the world with cinematography that almost redefines food porn.

6. Cooked

Cooked is Netflix’s other in-house food show flagship, executive produced by author Michael Pollan and human documentary machine Alex Gibney. I wasn’t sure what to think about this one since I read Botany of Desire in grad school and find Pollan to be at times… a little too fascinated with things, let’s say. But Cooked actually feels like it was made specifically for someone like me, who finds Chef’s Table kind of snobby, and who’s more about home cooking. Cooked and Chef’s Table are sort of a deconstructed No Reservations, with Chef’s Table handling the fancy restaurant stuff and Cooked much more concerned with history, culture, and the everyday cook. In the “Fire” episode they go to the outback and learn about the history of flame-cooking meats. They go to India and talk about “pot cooking,” as a window into the different attitudes toward food preparation in different cultures. I worried it’d be bloviating or over-intellectualized, but it’s mostly just well constructed and incredibly informative. Really good show.

5. A Cook Abroad

A Cook Abroad is sort of like Parts Unknown, but with a rotating host. At its best, it’s totally unique, like the episode where Glasgow-born (and thickly accented) Sikh chef Tony Singh visits his parents’ homeland, which was at least as touching as it was delicious-looking. It’s also very BBC, like when biker/Mediterranean chef Dave Meyer is traveling Egypt, and at one point just starts shouting words at a street food vendor and patrons, none of whom speak English. There are a good five minutes of that, people saying words neither side can understand. It makes you wonder, “Really? You guys couldn’t even spring for an interpreter?” But that’s part of the fun of the BBC, that an otherwise professional-looking show will retain some its public television wars, where they just go somewhere and start shooting with no apparent plan whatsoever. I haven’t seen the entire season, and it clearly varies based on the charisma of the host (Tony Singh, in particular, was a delight) but so far I’m sold.

4. The Great British Baking Show

The Great British Bake Off (and this slightly retitled American version) is guilty pleasure binge material for so many that it’s no wonder it shows up here. If I watch other cooking shows to travel to exotic places and vicariously experience strange foods, GBBS is kind of the opposite of that. Its strength is that it’s goofily charming. And we’ve become so accustomed to camera-hogging reality villains and performative not-here-to-make-friendsing that a show featuring charming grandmas and shy Brits is really a breath of fresh air. It almost works more like a mockumentary than a cooking show.

3. I’ll Have What Phil’s Having

I’m a little biased on account of I’ve been to Phil Rosenthal’s house, but let the record show that I was a big fan of both Phil and his show long before I took any bribes. Thing about Phil is, part of the reason I liked him in the first place is that he always seemed like the kind of guy who’d invite you over to his house way before I knew first-hand that he really is. Phil, who created Everybody Loves Raymond and must be worth unimaginable sums of money, is a kind of everyman Anthony Bourdain, and I think there’s a tremendous value in that. He doesn’t seem like an adventurous guy, and then he gets put into these situations where he’s eating a pond loach or some crazy thing and he turns into a pretty adventurous guy. I won’t restate what I’ve already written here, but the scene where Phil makes egg creams for his Japanese hosts goes right to the heart of what I find “meaningful” about the act of cooking, eating, writing and talking about food and travel with family and friends.

2. The Mind Of A Chef

Mind of a Chef is a food show Anthony Bourdain produces for PBS, which is already a walk-off home run in my mind, combining as it does the Michael Jordan of food shows and my favorite network for food programming that’s neither elitist fluff nor populist bullsh*t. Basically, Anthony Bourdain finds a moderately-known chef to play Anthony Bourdain for a whole or a half season (the first season’s host is David Chang). Food porn, travelogues, historical stuff, interesting characters — it’s Parts Unknown/No Reservations with some new blood. And the best part? The episodes are about 20 minutes long, which in my opinion is about optimal for Netflix food-show binging.

1. Parts Unknown

Once upon a ti,me I was resistant to Bourdain, with his pretentious voiceovers and cool-guy cowboy boots — tell me about New York back when it was still dangerous, Mr. Bourdain! — but I’ve long since warmed up to him, and there’s a reason I’ve compared virtually every show on this list to Bourdain’s. He’s the gold standard. You get food porn, aspirational travel stuff, famous chefs, and of course Bourdain himself. He’s idiosyncratic, but the more you watch him, the more you like him. Netflix has five seasons to choose from.

This week’s Top Chef really highlighted Top Chef‘s cruel side, which is probably my second favorite aspect of the show behind the brutal nitpicks of obscure food (“you call this fermented uni foam, you f*ckin’ IDIOT?”). It was time to bring back the winners of Last Chance Kitchen, Top Chef‘s online consolation bracket of past and current losers. It was the finale of Last Chance Kitchen, or at least, the first finale (yes, there will be another). This round pitted Brother Luck from last season against Nini from this season, with the winner getting to return to the house and the competition (loser has to continue sleeping in the Top Chef loser dogloo).

It was hard to know who to pull for, considering Nini got abruptly booted last week — over her front-of-the-house management, of all things — after winning most of the previous episodes. Brother, meanwhile, had an unprecedented run of wins in Last Chance Kitchen only to get eliminated in the one that actually counted — won by Joe Flamm, who went on to return to the house and win the show.

Phew, this is a lot of backstory.

Anyway, Brother went head-to-head with Nini in a mini-Restaurant Wars challenge at the beginning of the episode. Nini’s concept was “Mekong Delta meets Mississippi Delta” vs. Brother’s “Southwestern Japanese.” Viewers (me) and contestants alike were baffled as to what “Southwestern Japanese” would even look like, but apparently it has something to do with the fact that Brother’s parents were strippers.

Nini’s concept seemed to make a lot more sense on just about every level, and they seemed to be neck and neck in each dish, but Brother ended up winning, apparently on the strength of his final dish, a seared tuna atop an apple disc covered in beurre blanc sauce surrounded by pico de gallo — which I think we can all agree sounds weird as hell. Nini cried, Brother was redeemed, the show went on.

Finally, Brother would get his shot at redemption! …Which ended almost instantly, when he was eliminated at the end of this very show. Though as Tom noted, he will get another chance on Last Chance Kitchen, provided he manages to stay in it until the second to last show. I hope he somehow gets all the way to the end and loses again, cementing his legacy as the Buffalo Bills of Top Chef.

After that, Padma introduced the elimination challenge, a 1920s-themed party at an art deco hotel for which the chefs would choose old-fashioned cocktails and make “decadent canapés” based on them. Oh boy, a theme party, I guess that means Graham Elliot will finally get to wear something loud and obnoxious!

As an added benefit, all the cocktail drinking apparently got Padma pretty soused. At one point she was dancing with some rando townies, having a grand ol’ time until she saw the cameras and realized “Oops, I have to go back to work now.”

“These ‘er really inresting camapays!” Padma slurred at the end of the night, before the producers tucked her into bed next to an empty ice bucket to puke in (or so I imagined). I actually watched the show twice just to properly savor the joy of Padma getting progressively drunker. If we can’t have Gail, can we at least have more drunk Padma?

We might have to change Sweaty Eddie’s name to Steady Eddie for his consistency in landing in the top three. Just kidding, he’s still pretty sweaty. Eddie got some gentle ribbing for the manic intensity that inspired all of his nicknames at Judges Table, and he defended himself, saying “I’m really not stressed out, I just don’t think maybe my eyebrows and my face portrays exactly, like, what I’m feeling.”

It was probably the most genuinely funny moment of this season. Of course, it’s only fun and games when Eddie actually finishes in the top three. God help him when he’s actually on the bottom.

But Eddie did find success again this week, with some kind of reduced caramelized cream crumble over bourbon-cured salmon (a crudo??) inspired by an old fashioned. Everyone kept thinking he was burning his cream and trying to turn off his burner for him. It seems like a positive sign when none of the other chefs know what the hell you’re doing and you still beat them, which is why I have Eddie on top again. That being said, I feel like Sheldon from a few seasons ago and Eddie should have some kind of road trip together, where Sheldon teaches Eddie how to relax.

2. (even). David Viana — AKA: Maybe. AKA: Superfan. AKA: Mouse.

Bravo

David wore his sideways baseball cap again this week, which really tripped me out because David does not seem like a sideways baseball cap kind of guy. David seems more like a barbershop quartet hat kind of guy.

Anyway, David came out of the gate strong this season but keeps getting less and less screen time. He didn’t land in the top three this week but I’m keeping him in his slot regardless because he seemed like he was just off the lead and I have to reward consistency. David made a shrimp tartar inspired by a Gin Rickey. Tom said it had a “long finish, like a good cocktail.”

3. (+3) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

Eric redeemed my irrational belief in him at long last this week, winning the challenge with an oyster inspired by the 12-Mile Limit cocktail. Yes, all three of the top three dishes were raw stuff. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: crudos are the anti-risotto on this show. Anyway, Eric’s oyster had a pumpernickel crouton in it and I had no idea I wanted that but now I do. I’m glad there are other contestants who aren’t Eric on this show because he turns my analysis very dull. Nice food, Eric! You’re doing great, pal!

4. (even) Brandon Rosen — AKA: Heydrich. AKA: Biff. AKA: Shhhh.

Bravo

Brandon seems to get more and more likable even as his screen time gets less and less. Coincidence? Anyway, Brandon made a croquette this week, with duck and artichoke and some other crap, which the judges said was the “perfect canapé.” Brandon nonetheless failed to make the top three, possibly on account of Padma saying it needed more salt. As I’ve said, Padma, she like-a the spice.

Otherwise Brandon is really pissing me off because this season could really use a villain but other than the strange ways he contorts his face there has been precious little to hate about him of late. And trust me, I don’t need much of a reason.

Michelle quote: “I’m part Italian, part Mexican, and part Native American. I’ve always felt like I have a fire inside of me. Meditation helps me.”

Damn, lady, that meditation must work really well because so far you make Pace Picante Sauce seem fiery.

Michelle made a duck mousse-stuffed gougere this week and Padma said “the mousse made the gougere really soggy.”

Ouch. “Soggy gougere” sounds terrible and is also the name of my French Limp Bizkit cover band (named for the game where French teens in berets stand around smoking skinny cigarettes trying to cum on a gougere).

Anyway, it was an off week, but I still get the feeling Michelle is a favorite.

Kelsey disappointingly had far fewer on-brand moments this week than last week, when she berated the help for fogging her pearls. But she did do the thing Southern people do, where they think they’re being really subtle with their shade but it’s actually incredibly transparent. The object of her shade was, of course, Brother — whose sin was taking Nini’s place in the house. Oh, please, Kelsey, you of all people should know you’re not here to make friends.

Kelsey ended up in the top three this week, which makes sense. Pretending to be classy while getting sauced on cocktails at a swanky hotel seems right in her wheelhouse. It was her 12-Mile Limit-inspired scallop ceviche that got her there, a dish whose theme Kelsey said was “delicate, delicate, delicate.”

Then she celebrated the win by chugging a glass of sauvy b and tossing it at the fireplace.

Adrienne. Ah, yes, Adrienne. Adrienne is like the person sitting on the dais at a roast that you forgot to write jokes about. Adrienne made shrimp and avocado toast with watermelon, Padma said it was greasy. She still reminds me of a kindergarten teacher. Next!

The Weez had to be hella bummed that this wasn’t a CBD oil-pairing challenge. “Did none of the twenties cocktails have weed in them? …None? Really? Okay, that’s cool I guess, I was just checking…”

Weez was wearing his black fedora this week, which matched the napkins he plated his duck al orange-inspired mousse toasts on. I have to think that was deliberate. And that Justin has an entire closet with identical, different-colored fedoras on each shelf.

As for his dish, the judges said he “nailed it,” yet he managed to stay out of the top and bottom once again. Justin has an uncanny ability to stay in the dead center of the pack.

9. (-4) Sara Bradley — AKA: Party Mom.

Damn, Sara didn’t even wait for the end of that sentence. It could’ve been “…and then we’re going to saw our tits off with a hacksaw,” but she heard “party” and she was instantly onboard. PADMA: So stay tuned, after Graham’s funeral, there will be a reception party– SARA: Awesome. That’s so great. This is the best day.

Aw, I love you, Party Mom. Just slurring around the house while the kids get butthoused on her rum cake.

Unfortunately, Sara made a charred eggplant puree with a scallop and avocado dish that the judges described as “mush on mush on mush.” Actually, Tom had one of the more devastatingly bitchy disses of the episode when he said of Sara’s dish, “We’re here at a swanky cocktail party and Sara gives us a dip that you could find on the table at a PTA meeting.”

Oof, I hope there were fire extinguishers on set because that is a BURN.

Anyway, that’s why streaky Sara dropped four slots this week. No more scallops, Party Mom.

I’m continually impressed by Brian’s ability to look uncomfortable in any outfit. Coming off last week’s win — for his front-of-the-house management, of all things — Brian made a fennel and calabrian chile sausage with fennel-top gnocchi dish, which sounded really good, only he ended up getting behind so he had to just chuck all the sausage on a flat top like a short order cook and throw the gnocchi in the deep fryer. He ended up with a dish so dry that Tom called it “sand in a cup” and a gnocchi so unappetizing Padma called it “a grease sponge,” the second best description of your mom’s physique behind “mush mush mush.”

Anyway, Brian almost went home this week and did not inspire much confidence. He desperately needs to get his mojo back. It seems like he slowly became the kind of guy who writes lengthy training manuals for his employees to try to “build a culture.” Something needs to shake him up, turn him back into that indie rock rebel with tats about how authority sucks. Maybe he takes Eddie’s psych meds by mistake and falls off the wagon? Just spitballing here.

Dammit, Brother, how did you fuck this up so bad? …What’s that you say? Having to compete in two challenges in a row on three hours of sleep? …Okay I suppose I can understand that.

Still, you had to groan at the thought process here. This was a guy who got booted the first time for taking too many liberties with a German food challenge so that he could cook something Asian. This time, he was tasked with a dish inspired by the Southside Fizz. Whereas chef Eric took the 12-Mile Limit and thought of people partying on a boat and was inspired to create an oyster dish — a fairly fitting art deco-era canapé — Brother Luck’s thought process, as he explained it, went: “I figured since it’s Southside, I’d go Southeast… Asia, direction, and that’s why I’m doing a banh mi.”

Thus he somehow ended up making a tiny bowl of marinated chicken thigh. The judges called it a “spice bomb,” and “I don’t even taste chicken, all I taste is hot.”

All things being equal, I thought Brother’s spicy chicken thigh slurry still looked better than Sara’s PTA meeting baba ghanoush scallop disaster, but that could just be my dislike of scallops talking. Either way, there was some beautiful symmetry in watching Brother Luck claw and scratch his way back into the competition over the course of two years only to be instantly booted in the first challenge. Stay nasty, Top Chef.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

]]>https://uproxx.com/life/top-chef-power-rankings-1606/feed/14tchef-grid-uproxx.jpgA Conversation With Documentarian Jon Ronson About His New Podcast Investigating The Suicide Of August Ameshttps://uproxx.com/life/jon-ronson-interview-august-ames-last-days-of-august-podcast/
https://uproxx.com/life/jon-ronson-interview-august-ames-last-days-of-august-podcast/#commentsThu, 10 Jan 2019 19:28:17 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401683388

Getty Image

Porn star August Ames committed suicide last December, in the midst of a social media crisis that started when she tweeted that she wouldn’t work with male co-stars who had done gay sex scenes. There was a backlash over this perceived homophobia and a few days later she was dead, found hanging in a public park. This all but ensured that her death would forever be blamed on “cyberbullying.”

As this was happening, journalist and documentarian Jon Ronson had just wrapped his podcast about the porn industry, and the ripple effects of free online porn, The Butterfly Effect. Which had, in turn, come on the heels of his last book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which had studied what happens to people who have suffered notable shamings started by and/or exacerbated by the internet and social media. Thus, the death of August Ames — the erstwhile Mercedes Grabowski, 23, of Nova Scotia, Canada — seemed like a perfect triangulation of Ronson’s areas of expertise.

“The initial reason for wanting to tell the story turned into something very different as the various twists and turns in the story revealed themselves,” Ronson told Uproxx. “The initial reason was that I thought this was a public shaming story. My initial idea was pretty unambitious. I thought I wanted to do a very small story, maybe a 3,000-word story in The Guardian, or something, that would both explain August’s life, you know, portray her as the rounded human being she was. But, also do the same for people who piled in on August.”

One of the notable people who “piled in” on August was Jaxton Wheeler, a pansexual porn star, who had tweeted to Ames, “the world is waiting for your apology, or for you to swallow a cyanide pill.”

“At that moment the kind of official story was, ‘August tweets something homophobic. Jaxton said, ‘Go and take a cyanide pill,’ and then August dies,'” Ronson says, describing the initial coverage of Ames’ death. “But, during the very earliest part of the fact-checking process, that changed. Jaxton told me that his cyanide tweets had been written after August had died, which turned out to be true. And then the next thing that happened was I was in Jessica Drake’s [another porn star accused of piling on August over the tweet] hotel room and she was telling all that coded stuff to me. Like, ‘you need to be looking at that relationship between Kevin [August’s husband] and August.'”

That’s when the investigation shifted from a potential Guardian story to a full spin-off podcast series, The Last Days Of August, which was just released this past week on Audible.

Investigating August’s relationship with her husband makes up a central storyline in The Last Days Of August. He had tried to make cyberbullying the central issue in the wake of Ames’ death, almost going out of his way to blame Jessica Drake and others. Some of those people had thrown doubt upon the circumstances of Ames’ supposed suicide. It’s all the ingredients for a captivating murder mystery, but Ronson makes some surprising choices in the way he reports it, saying at the outset that there’s no evidence for anything but suicide and he doesn’t want to use false suspicion for “dramatic tension.”

“I really love true crime shows, but also really, I’ve heard a multitude of ethical violations,” Ronson says. “And I didn’t want to make the same mistakes that I cringe at when I see other people doing it.”

Specifically, he says “The main one is spreading suspicion that somebody might be a murderer as a kind of narrative device to keep people listening. As a listener to podcasts I succumb to that as much as anybody else does, but as a maker of those stories, I just think it’s ethically wrong to do it.”

“I had a sort of epiphany, in the middle of the night. A couple of months ago where I thought ‘this is how to solve that ethical problem.’ I’m gonna say something at the beginning of episode two that deflates that idea. If I hadn’t done that, it would be preying on me,” Ronson says.

Aside from the ethical pitfalls, there were also the natural barriers of trying to report on the somewhat insular porn world. Sex workers being some of the most vulnerable to the political winds, they’ve been burned by, and are naturally wary of, potentially sensational or even misinterpretable journalism. So there’s a bit of a wall that goes up if they suspect something potentially negative.

To put it simply, The Last Days of August tells a fascinating story, and Ronson had to traverse a minefield in order to do it. I spoke to him and his co-producer, Lina Misitzis, about it this past week.

—

Do you think you got answers to the questions that you were looking for when you set out to report this story?

JON: Yes. You know, we had stumbled into a story that was about why this, you know, lovely 23-year-old died. That’s what the story became — sifting through the various rumors to try to figure out why she died. What were the complicated, manifold reasons why she died? And I feel that we’ve answered that question. Sometimes the reasons are big and awful, sometimes the reasons are small and just psychological biases. But I feel very sure that what Lina and I spent the last year doing was an honorable endeavor.

Tell me about working with Lina. What was that partnership like? How did you guys split your duties?

JON: Basically the way that it works out is that Lina is in charge of the pre-production. So Lina does most of the scheduling, the contracts with people, asking them to participate, and so on. And then the production side, you know, getting the tape, that’s both of us. And then the post-production side, the kind of storytelling, the structure of the story, that’s mainly me. So that’s kind of how it works. But in general, Lina’s the best collaborator I’ve ever had. I think we’re very similar, we look at the world in very similar ways, and working with her has been one of the best joys of my life.

You sort of talked about this in the podcast, you’re talking about exploring these conspiracy theories, or people’s theories. How do you explore those without giving credence to them, in case you end up finding out they aren’t true.

JON: Our job, and I think it’s a fundamental part of a journalist’s job, is to listen to everything and then weigh it all out. Hopefully with maturity, and thought, and figure out the best as you can, using all the techniques we have to figure out the truth. Other times in the show people say things that turn out to not be true. But I would say that by the end of episode seven you find out the real reasons why August died.

LINA: There were conspiracy theories, but we don’t know that they’re conspiracy theories when we first hear them. Sometimes we hear something and we think “if that’s true, that’s incredible.” And there were a few stories that we heard that we really went down the road of investigating, like, we would spend weeks on, that don’t even make it into the series, because they just turned out to not be true.

JON: I just said to Lina, I think it’s okay to tell them what one of those stories was without giving away too much.

LINA: There was a rumor that was kinda relayed to us by a few people, that Jessica Drake knew Kevin Moore’s statement [accusing Drake of bullying August Ames into suicide] was coming. And in order to get ahead of it they leaked to The Wall Street Journal the details of Stormy Daniels’ payoff, because Jessica is very peripherally connected to the Stormy Daniels story. The theory was that she did this to get attention away from Kevin’s accusations against her. And the reason we even gave it any attention is because the Wall Street Journal article did come out the day after Kevin Moore posted his statement about Jessica, and this was the first article breaking the story.

JON: We spent probably close to a month reporting that story before coming to the conclusion that it just was not true. But that’s an example of one that we just disproved [and didn’t include in the show].

Right, I mean, do you think the episodic podcast medium gives you a different responsibility in that way? In that, maybe by episode seven we find out something’s a certain way, but how much do you trust that someone’s gonna listen all the way to the end? And how much responsibility to do you have not to give them a false impression at the end of, like, episode three?

JON: Yes, I think this gets to a really important point. We were extremely aware of that and made decisions to mitigate it. We were never gonna release these shows one by one. For that specific reason. We drop it all at once, for that ethical reason.

Going back to Lisa Ann. With porn people, it sort of feels like they’re so used to news stories maybe being taken out of context or sensationalized, in a way that further marginalizes them, and it feels like there can be this wall of distrust that you had to fight though.

JON: Yeah, I mean, I really like Lisa Ann, and when I was introduced to her for The Butterfly Effect, we got on really well. I had breakfast with her in Times Square… She lives in Times Square. Maybe last summer, she explained to me that the reason why was she lives in Times Square was that it’s a place where things are more bright and colorful than she was, so people wouldn’t gawk at her. So I do really like Lisa Ann, but you know, that conversation that we had in the Last Days Of August, I kind of didn’t like, because she was telling me what I was thinking. And it wasn’t what I was thinking, she was pre-judging me. I completely understand the reason why. Because porn people are marginalized and stigmatized so often. But the fact is our intentions were honorable. The Butterfly Effect was a really positive show about the porn industry. August’s story is real, and the reason why we’re telling August’s story are not ideological reasons. We’re not telling August’s story to shed some negative light on the porn industry. We’re telling August’s story because it’s a true story.

Right, do you feel like with porn there’s this danger where anything that you do is misinterpreted as this blanket positive or this blanket negative about porn itself?

JON: Yeah, that can happen. I hope that we’ve worked really hard to explain to people in the show that that’s not what we’re doing. I mean, we say several times in the show, “August’s story should not be considered representative of the porn industry.” You have very positive stories happening in porn as well as very negative stories, it’s all true. And one doesn’t erase the other. And honestly, that just goes to the way that I see the world, and that I do not want to tell ideological stories, I want to tell truthful, human stories.

You talked about it earlier. But what do you think is exciting about the podcast as a medium at this point in time?

JON: I just love the fact that it’s like the sort of wild west of narrative non-fiction storytelling. You know, there’s no gatekeepers, telling you how to make the show, nobody’s on your back. And I think people love that. I love it, as a fan of podcasts. That people are experimenting with structure… You know right from season one of Serial on… Actually even before that — WTF with Marc Maron, and Joe Rogan, and shows like that. That sort of long-form interview shows. That was breaking the mold as well. So I think it’s endemic of what’s happening, people experimenting with structure. And I love that, and I think a lot of listeners do too.

LINA: Something that Jon and I have talked about before is that there are some stories that are best told with sounds, not visually and not on paper. And I think this is one of them. Part of the reason why is because of how stigmatized folks in the porn industry are and not just stigmatized but how easy it is to look at someone you know from porn and just immediately associate them with sex. Which is great, except if we’re telling a story that isn’t about sex, we want people to concentrate on the story instead of the vocation. Sound really lent itself to that.

Do you feel a different kind of fan connection when you make a podcast? It seems like it’s a more intimate medium, in a way, because you’re with people in their car, or when they’re doing chores around the house, or whatever.

JON: Yeah, and also, that’s how I consume non-fiction these days more than anything else. I get all of my long-form non-fiction from podcasts, you know, shows like Slow Burn and so on. So, yeah, I think that’s probably the piece that’s been helping more and more. I think it’s not just me, I think generally the world is consuming non-fiction, more though podcasts and less through other things. And I love it, I want to be on the move. I get distracted if I’m sitting down, that’s why I’d much rather listen to a podcast than read the newspaper.

Do you think having been around porn and reported on it for so long has given you a particular perspective about the dangers of reporting on that industry?

LINA: Oh like the pitfalls of reporting on porn? Absolutely, I think we saw the pitfalls in the first few weeks after August died. If you don’t really know the industry or the people involved, then it’s very easy to put out a story about how August Ames was cyperbullied to death by her friends in the industry. It really just took a few phone calls to find out that many, many people in porn disagreed with that narrative and feel it’s much more complicated than that.

So, Jon, coming from working on a book about shaming, were you sort of surprised to find there being a caveat to the bullying narrative?

JON: No, because one of the things that became very clear to me when I was writing my public shaming book is that it’s a terrible habit of Twitter to define somebody by some little blip of their lives. You’re some anonymous person with 200 Twitter followers, you tweet something that comes out poorly, and to the world you become emblematic of some ideology. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Humans have a lot of shit going on and it’s wrong to define people that way. And it’s the reason we have real courtrooms, because when you send something you want to hear the wider context of what else is going on in that person’s life. But I think Twitter forgets that option. It forgets that, you know, people have complicated lives.

So when it presents itself that there were these other things happening in August’s life that might have contributed to her suicide… It surprised me in that, I didn’t think that would happen in this particular story, because it was just this bullying story, but it didn’t surprise me because I’d come to that realization. And that’s one of the problems that I’ve had with public shaming in general is that it’s so one dimensional. People want to see people in one-dimensional terms. People want to turn people into representatives of something. The fact is, looking back on it now, the idea that, the bullying would be the only reason that August died, seems, kind of absurd, actually. But right now, as we’re talking, it’s what most people believe. You know, until they hear our show.

Is it surprising in any way that people in porn, who are sort of very used to putting their image out there for people to interpret in a very one dimensional way, that they would also still be so vulnerable to that kind of shaming?

JON: Oh, yeah, of course. I used to do this storytelling night in Brooklyn, and one night we had Stoya on as a guest. And she would read this essay that she had written. And somebody in the audience said to me afterwards “I can’t believe that somebody who has sex on camera for a living would be so nervous about being on stage, in front of hundreds of people reading an essay.” And of course, of course that’s not surprising. So yeah, of course. People who are very open about their sexuality can still feel, can still be very vulnerable about other things. And, in fact, I would say that’s often the case.

People say that stand up comedy is like a way of controlling when people laugh at you. Is there something to porn where it’s like a way to control when you’re being sexualized?

JON: Obviously, I put that to August’s brother, James, about whether her childhood abuse might have contributed to her deciding to get into the adult industry. James said he spent a lot of time thinking about the same thing too, and on the one hand, logically that does make sense, but on the other hand, as James says, August was a cheerleader, she wanted to be the center of attention, she knew she was beautiful, she liked boys… So, I would say, in August’s case, being the kind of annoying liberal, moderate that I am, I would say there’s probably some truth in both things. That her abuse contributed, but so did the other, more positive things.

Is there push-back from other porn people when you report on childhood abuse of porn stars? Just because that’s such a stereotype?

JON: Well, it’s true in August’s case.

LINA: And also I mean, yeah, the answer is yes. I mean, there’s not push-back but I think there is this very understandable feeling of… just because it’s true of members of the industry, we don’t want the implication to be that it’s true of everyone in the industry. And it’s not, and we do our very best in the in the series to make that very clear, and we just can’t help what August’s circumstances were.

JON: Our job has become to figure out the truth of why August died. Which I think is a kind of valuable and honorable thing to do. Also, we can’t control the kind of pre-judgements that listeners will bring to this story. And I really hope that most people who like my stuff, like it because it’s not ideological. They like it because it’s true and human and complex and about psychology. It’s not didactic and it’s not ideological. I hope most people who know my work will come to it in that same spirit of curiosity.

That’s right folks, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The Best of 2018 Frotcast episode is finally here! Just in time for this fresh new graphic (thanks, @briespiel).

I even let Matt write the episode description:

Hey, everyone. It’s 2019 and that means 2018 is officially over! Congratulations to those of you who made it out alive. Although 2018 was a pretty crappy year for some people, for the Filmdrunk Frotcast it was actually pretty okay in terms of #content. Which is why we are pleased to give you not just one but TWO Frotcast Best of 2018 episodes! Part 1 of the best of is available to the entire Frotcast family while part 2 is available here to our beloved Patreon subscribers. The Best Ofs were edited by listener Peter Marez, so if you’d like to make a donation to his paypal I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Don’t worry, we also paid him for his work but if you really enjoy the episodes, maybe show him some love via murney.

]]>https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/frotcast-best-2018/feed/14frotcast-new_graphic_landscape650The Best Part Of The Golden Globes: Amy Poehler And Maya Rudolph Made Their Case As Oscar Hostshttps://uproxx.com/movies/amy-poehler-maya-rudolph-golden-globes-oscars-hosts/
https://uproxx.com/movies/amy-poehler-maya-rudolph-golden-globes-oscars-hosts/#commentsMon, 07 Jan 2019 18:47:42 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401682787

Like many pop culture writers, I force-fed myself the Golden Globes telecast last night. And like most awards shows, it was largely interminable, punctuated with occasional moments of genuine joy and spontaneity. Do we even need to bring up the pointlessness of the Globes themselves? That they’ve long been accused of being a corrupt organization with an obscure membership and the only time they made news this past year outside of the awards ceremony was with a bizarre/offensive profile of Drew Barrymore that they ended up apologizing for?

…Probably not.

For the most part, we assume that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is corrupt and no one cares because they throw a good party. It’s like Scientology; every time it comes up, you feel a duty to bring up Shelly Miscavige not being seen in public since 2007, but there’s only so many times you can do that before becoming the “well, actually” guy. Better to assume everyone already knows the Golden Globes are dumb. Better to just pretend that this small group of foreign film junketeers just genuinely did think BOHEMIAN F*CKING RHAPSODY was the best movie of the year and go on with your day.

Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh hosted last night’s telecast, and they were… fine. Not that I blame them, they’re both likable and talented, but to be an awards show host is to risk career suicide. Everything about the awards process is thoroughly ridicule-worthy — think Jared Leto winning an Oscar for playing a trans woman and then dedicating his victory to the people of Ukraine — but to make fun of some of the tools in the audience is to risk one of those tools not hiring you. That’s a lot to ask of two people with already thriving careers. Sandra Oh won an acting award on her own telecast! Better to just make the inoffensive, maybe slightly lame jokes and live to act another day, I get that. No one really expects these shows to be entertaining anyway.

The speeches ranged from delightful and touching — Regina Hall, Glenn Close, Christian Bale — to Chuck Lorre, collecting best TV comedy for The Kominsky Method (I know there’s a lot of TV out there now but has anyone actually seen this show?), who managed to combine the fewest actual words spoken with the longest on-stage time. “I’d like to thank… um… wow… my wife…. gosh… okay… uh, my pal, Dave… wow… um… my kids… our make up guy… um … wow…”

Hey, aren’t you a sitcom writer? Maybe trying saying more than one word every seven seconds.

The most unfortunate aspect of the telecast was that seemingly every moment of genuine spontaneity got bleeped. Can we go back to a simple bleep over the swear word instead of the thing where you drop out the entire audio for five seconds? I think Patricia Arquette said something about having “f*cked up teeth” and Escape from Dannemora‘s make up people not having to work so hard, and that Steve Carell said Carol Burnett “makes Tom Hanks look like an asshole,” but the excessive bleeping ruined both of those jokes. Alas.

Which brings us to the real highlight of the evening: Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph presenting the awards for best-supporting actor and best original screenplay. Up until that point, I’d assumed that the only two options for a host were a gleeful prick like Ricky Gervais or someone sweet and charming but safe like Samberg and Oh. It’s hard to poke even gentle fun at Hollywood liberals without sounding like a MAGAtroll these days, and Ricky Gervais stopped being funny years ago. And so, I assumed, we’d just have to accept always being a little bored.

I didn’t realize that maybe there was another option. Not until Rudolph and Poehler introduced the best supporting actor award, beginning with a bit about the types of lines supporting actors get to say. They returned after Mahershala Ali collected his award to stage a fake proposal. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing this, are we stealing focus away from the next award?”

“Don’t worry, it’s just screenplay.”

It gave me genuine giggles, and I was so thankful for it. It wasn’t even about anything they said so much as the perfect combination of natural chemistry, impeccable timing, and genuine silliness. Silliness! That’s the ticket, I thought, chomping my imaginary cigar. I’d forgotten how much I’d missed silliness for silliness’s sake — jokes without a timely peg or a moral.

The Golden Globes are essentially the Iowa caucus of entertainment. A seemingly meaningless little contest decided by a tiny cabal of esoteric weirdos that nonetheless gains outsize importance as a harbinger for future contests.

So as long as we’re looking for Oscars takeaways, maybe I could suggest Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph as hosts? They took the world’s most contrived format and made it look breezy, spontaneous, silly, and fun.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

The best way to spend the holidays is curled up next to a warm fire, sipping some hot cocoa and hanging out with your family. The way your Frotcast family spent it was talking about Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice. On this week’s bonus Frot, Matt and Vince are joined by twitter user/man who only gives out his real name to $10 patreon donors, Bobby Bigwheel.

We discuss everything about the movie Vice, from the needlessly cartoonish portrayal of George W Bush by Sam Rockwell, to the brilliant casting choice of Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld who – as Mr. Bigwheel points out – was the Michael Scott of the Bush administration.

Inexplicably, the one thing we don’t talk about is how good Christian Bale’s make up was. Honestly, I don’t know how we missed this talking point. It’s like the one thing everyone talks about and possibly the only reason I ever watch a biopic to completion and enjoy the experience. I spent all of that awful Tupac movie smiling and repeating to myself “he looks just like Tupac tho” and didn’t notice it was bad until it ended. Point is, we don’t discuss Christian Bale’s perfect make up, but we talk about other facets of the movie that are equally as important. Like how Adam McKay’s directing can sometimes be annoying. Anyway, please listen and enjoy. Oh I suppose before you listen I should say *Spoiler Alert* just in case you didn’t know that Bush did 9/11. Just kidding. [written by Matt]

This week on the Frotcast, we welcome back Joey Devine from the Roundball Rock podcast and Joe Sinclitico from Adam Devine’s Houseparty to discuss our favorite movies of the year as well as our favorite local news bloopers. We all list our top three movies of 2018, including extended discussions of Paddington 2, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Sorry To Bother You, Mary Poppins Returns, and more.

We also bring back cookbook author Michelle Doll to discuss her latest cookbook,Essential Tools, Tips, & Techniques for the Home Cook. She also talks glyphosate, spills the secrets to beating Bobby Flay, and whether beating Bobby Flay means that you become him, like the Santa Clause. Enjoy and Frot on, and RIP, Didi Megadoodoo. You’ll never be lonely when you have the Frotcast.

With virtually every climate forecast predicting that we’ll see some kind of societal breakdown within our own lifetimes, it’s probably inevitable that we’d reflexively live out our worst end-of-days scenarios on film. In Susanne Bier’s Bird Box, that apocalyptic scenario is… an unidentified something — maybe a biological weapon, maybe an airborne virus, maybe an angry God — but certainly a thing that lives outdoors and will make you instantly commit suicide if you look at it (and with a 100% success rate). It offers a vivid new vision of the apocalypse without necessarily having much new to say about it.

The deadly whatever strikes suddenly, coming to Sacramento just as pregnant single artist Malorie, played by Sandra Bullock with a perfect smoky eye, is on her way home from a prenatal checkup. She’s a reluctant mother worried she won’t be able to summon the necessary maternal instincts in time for her progeny. Mass hysteria puts that on the backburner for a while as she has to deal with crashing cars and flying corpses — a full-on societal collapse.

The rub of this outdoor airborne Medusa virus is that you have to force yourself not to see if you want to live, like a high stakes game of Made You Look. It’s also an almost perfect mash-up of A Quiet Place and Children of Men.

Bird Box‘s strength is a unique and vividly realized vision of the apocalypse, which allows for some memorable imagery, like Sandra Bullock in a blindfold floating down a foggy river with two blindfolded in children in tow (are they hers? where did that second one come from?). The dialogue (with Eric Heisserer adapting from a book by Josh Malerman) is also sharp and realistic, particularly in the opening scene between Malorie and her sister, played by Sarah Paulson. (Is Sarah Paulson ever not great?)

The action gets slightly more contrived when Malorie holes up in a nice house owned by misanthropic intellectual Douglas (John Malkovich) and a rogue’s gallery of “types,” which includes: Douglas’s gay neighbor (BD Wong), a young cop-in-training (Rosa Salazar), the funny grocery store clerk (Lil Rel Howery), the good-hearted war veteran guy (Trevante Rhodes), a sweet older woman (Jacki Weaver), and a rapper for some reason, played by Machine Gun Kelly. Actually, I don’t know if Machine Gun Kelly was supposed to be playing a rapper in the movie, or why he was there at all, really, other than to take me out of the narrative every time he was onscreen. I can’t imagine the thought process that goes, “Gee, who could we cast opposite Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, and Jacki Weaver? Ooh, I know, Machine Gun Kelly.” The guy must have an incredible agent.

Bird Box is strong on premise, imagery, and in the way it imagines the ripple effects of an apocalyptic event. The truest, most self-evident compliment I can give it is that when I heard a bump outside my apartment while I was watching it I got legitimately scared. It’s effective at putting you in the dystopian mindset. Do you hole up or investigate? Try to help others or circle the wagons?

Dystopian narratives often have trouble with follow through, the apocalypse apparently being easier to write yourself into than write yourself out of. Bird Box is no different. Perhaps that’s just the nature of the genre. I remember even being disappointed with the ending of Children of Men, though I’ve come to appreciate it more with time.

Bird Box doesn’t lose much of its value as a thriller, but as it goes on it becomes increasingly clear that it doesn’t have much to offer thematically. There’s a group of people whom the medusa virus doesn’t seem to affect, who seem to welcome it. What’s their deal? It’s an interesting twist worth exploring, but the film never goes further than their utility as antagonists would require.

Motherhood issues seem to go hand in hand with apocalyptic narratives, as they do in Malorie’s case. The central question seems to be whether the protective mothering instinct is inherently altruistic, to be able to put another person’s safety above one’s own, or simply tribal and primal, protecting one’s own genes at the expense of everything else — and in that, the ultimate act of selfishness. mother!, for all the things people supposedly hated about it, was one of the few films to grapple honestly with this.

Bird Box seems aware of the question, which manifests in the mystery of Malorie’s two children and how that plays out, but it’s mostly too timid to hazard a take. Instead, it retreats into familiar banalities about the importance of family and sells itself out for a weird, unsatisfying ending. Or sells itself down the river, as it were.

Still, it’s memorable if not exactly complete. Bird Box proves the relevance of dystopian narratives even as it ultimately disappoints. Maybe that’s why we keep trying to make this movie, because we know we still haven’t gotten it quite right.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

]]>https://uproxx.com/movies/bird-box-review-netflix/feed/36birdbox-river650‘Top Chef’ Power Rankings, Week 5: So Hard To Find Good Help These Dayshttps://uproxx.com/life/top-chef-power-rankings-1605/
https://uproxx.com/life/top-chef-power-rankings-1605/#commentsFri, 04 Jan 2019 13:10:00 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401678580

BRAVO

This week on Top Chef we saw the thrilling conclusion of restaurant wars, that perennial Top Chef challenge in which the chefs take a break from food and suddenly get judged on things like interior design and the competence of their staff. I exaggerate slightly, but is this anyone else’s least favorite challenge? Don’t get me wrong, it’s good television and everything, it’s just that I always feel like I’ve stumbled into Hell’s Kitchen.

It’s all dramatic music and people fighting and shots of blurry customers. It stresses me out!

There’s a certain kind of escapism that comes from watching someone get judged solely for the texture of their risotto. Restaurant Wars is lots more interpersonal politics and economic realities and people yelling at each other and someone getting blamed for someone else’s mistakes, and another person losing a promotion because they didn’t toot their own horn enough. TOO REAL. Give me Tom Colicchio balling someone out for overly toothsome canapés any day.

On the plus side, after a whole season of missed sex pun opportunities, about juicy meat and Nini’s spicy box, Padma finally released her inner pervert and acknowledged the euphemistic value of a custard with “a nice jiggle.” Thank God. Own your brand, Padma. And that brand is being an elegant supermodel and brilliant cosmopolitan author who is not above a “that’s what she said.” Padma can say “that’s what she said” with only her eyes.

By the way, was it too much to ask to find some servers and hosts who know who Padma is? First, a hostess asked her “what’s the reservation under?” Really? Imagine not knowing this was a famous chick:

Bravo

That’s the jacket equivalent of being carried in on a litter. Later, Sara asked a waiter if he knew which one Padma was and he admitted that he didn’t. Hmm, probably the seven-foot tall one sitting on a jewel-encrusted sedan? Or perhaps the only one at the table who clearly hails from the subcontinent? I feel like this is low-level process of elimination here.

Eddie number one?! Believe it. No, he didn’t “win” this episode, an honor that went to Brian, for Brian’s front of the house management and chicken ballotine, which easily overshadowed Eddie’s “forgotten crudo” in the appetizer round. But let’s not forget: Eddie was the one who actually cooked the ballotine. And it’s not like Brian invented chicken ballotine, the cooking part is kind of the whole deal, no?

Then, in the entree round, judge Nilou Motamed said “Eddie’s puree eats like magic” which is something I’ve always dreamed of a woman saying about me. Eddie has been just off the lead for a bunch of challenges in a row now, and it looks like he’s on the verge of sewing his pinky back on and really taking charge of this competition.

2. (+6). David Viana — AKA: Maybe. AKA: Superfan. AKA: Mouse.

Bravo

The smallest-voiced Top Chef competitor who phrases all his statements with a question mark continued his strategy of being incredibly low-impact this week. David earned praise for his snapper and creole duck and despite being on the losing team was never in danger of being eliminated. David feels like a near lock to make it to the finale, but if he doesn’t I imagine he’ll still be super polite about it.

Michelle crushed her agnolotti this week just like we knew she would, with some of the judges calling it their favorite of the night. Somehow, this did not earn her the win. So why isn’t she ranked higher? I don’t know. Like Donald Trump’s net worth, these power rankings are based on however I feel that day. Michelle seems like a favorite, and that’s about all I have to say about her. We’re going to need a visit from her shaman grandma to make her interesting.

4. (even) Brandon Rosen — AKA: Heydrich. AKA: Biff. AKA: Shhhh.

Bravo

It pains me to put Brandon at the number four spot, just off the leaders, even though he has been much more tolerable since episode one. That being said, even when he’s not being overtly obnoxious Brandon still has the facial expressions of someone who’s never had a face before. This week he sabotaged Sarah’s soup by spiking it with pickled ginger, though his soy custard (sorry that still sounds terrible) had the “nice jiggle” Padma loves.

The judges also thought the corn he put on his dessert was weird (imagine that!). Come on, being corny is Brandon’s brand.

5. (even) Sara Bradley — AKA: Party Mom.

Bravo

Sara’s biggest contribution to this episode was taking so long to explain the menu to the judges that the editors had to use a time-lapse montage. Shouldn’t the rolling eyes and long sighs have been a clue to wrap it up? Read the room, lady!

There was also a nice moment where the editors contrasted Sara’s egalitarian front of the house management style to some of the other competitors, like Kelsey.

SARA: I always try to treat everyone with respect. These are my people, you know?

SMASH CUT TO:

KELSEY: Could someone PLEASE tell the help to hold their breath when they enter the room with me?? Their vulgar breath is fogging my pearls!

Anyway, it was hard to tell how good Sara’s actual food was this week, seeing as how Brandon sabotaged her soup with excessive ginger. She seems solidly middle of the pack.

6. (even) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

Eric still seems like student body president, but I had to ding him a few spots for his salty pork. He made a scallop and pork dish with carrots two ways (a duo duo!) and the judges loved his scallops, but his salty pork made Padma make this face:

Adrienne made two desserts this week, one a cheese plate with some bread, the other what looked like some yogurt on a plate topped with a single peach and some granola — er, excuse me, hazelnut crumble:

Bravo

You call that a dessert? The judges loved it, by the way. Next week Adrienne is going to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off and read us facts about Siberian tigers from Zoobooks. Oh look, she brought orange slices for the whole team! What a brilliant dish!

Extremely on brand Kelsey quote of the week: “Servers! I don’t want to hear your voices.”

SERVERS! Do NOT make eye contact with Kelsey! This is a Lululemon chef’s coat and your tawdry leering destroys the resale value.

So yeah, Kelsey was caught in the maelstrom of team Third Coast (the third coast is strife!), though she did manage to make a well-received pannacotta in between dressing down the help and sabotaging Nini’s dessert. Who the hell even knows where Kelsey stands right now? She’s up, she’s down, she’s drinking too much wine and getting loose with the gossip…

God help me I love Kelsey. I hope she stays in this competition solely for the joke fodder.

Brian won this week, so why do I have him so low? I don’t know, I guess it’s because he mostly won for his front of the house management (the last time this skill will be rewarded in the competition) and it seemed like he got all the credit for Eddie’s cooking.

I admit, my reaction might just be a response to Brian basically writing an HR manual during this challenge and saying that he wanted to “build a culture.” Barf, dude, go run an insurance company if you’re going to talk like that. Soulless corporate speak should be shamed, not rewarded.

Then again, the last time I wrote off the guy who won restaurant wars for his front of the house management, the guy ended up winning the entire competition (that would be Joe Flamm, last season). Also, did anyone else notice that Brian kind of looked and sounded like Droopy Dog in a suit? I’ve never seen a human who so much resembled a cartoon dog.

The Weez was notably unchill this entire episode, getting super pissed at Nini over her front-of-the-house management. To be fair, having your food constantly sent back would piss anyone off (I had to rewrite an entire “best of” list last week because my browser ate it and I still haven’t gotten over it), though it’s a little unclear whose fault their team’s disarray actually was. It seemed like Nini mostly didn’t get to train the staff not out of carelessness but because the team hadn’t budgeted enough time for their prep work. And as executive chef, wasn’t that partly Justin’s job? And was it wrong to expect the wait staff to understand table numbers?

Moreover, how didn’t any of this come up during judges table? Justin managed to make one of the worst dishes (the dreaded viscous bisque) while captaining the losing team and somehow wasn’t even in the conversation for who would be sent home. Classic Wee-eez. If Justin goes this entire season without extolling the virtues of CBD oil I will eat my own ass.

11. (-2) ((Eliminated)) Nini Nguyen — AKA: Brooklyn. AKA: Bad Cop.

Bravo

WHAAAAT?!? Can you believe this season’s most prolific challenge winner went home for being a bad hostess? I guess Nini is to blame for inheriting a wait staff who couldn’t understand table numbers or the concept of needing a spoon to eat soup, but it seems, I dunno, a smidge harsh. Less forgivable I suppose was her food, a chocolate something-or-other surprise, with a sometimes cacao nib sorbet. Tom said it wasn’t nearly chocolatey enough to please a chocoholic, which makes sense because chocoholics are like the food equivalent of Disney freaks. Here is my most controversial food take: chocolate isn’t that good. I’ve never gotten that excited about chocolate. Hurrr, I love eating beans for dessert, durrrr.

I genuinely hope Nini wins Last Chance Kitchen because she got a raw deal.

Well we all saw this one coming, didn’t we? Smooth Fabio had been underperforming for a while. His unforgivable sin this week was serving scallops with some kind of sweet applesauce and a short rib dish that turned out far too toothsome. As one of the judges pointed out, “if you dropped this short rib off a building it would stay in one piece.”

Because as we all know, the true test of a short rib is how well it does suicide. Anyway, we’ll miss you, Smooth Fabio. We’ll never forget your sexy accent and uncanny ability to have perfectly uniform hair length on your neck and skull.

(*singing*) One plug over the line, Sweet Mary, one plug over the line…

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

We’re living through a golden age in podcasting — that perfect sweet spot where the general public has started to recognize the form, creators are expanding its possibilities, and there isn’t so much money in play that the speculators and non-enthusiasts have swept in to ruin it like… well, like most other things on the internet.

For now, podcasts are almost exclusively created by and for the people who love them, supported sometimes by ads, but even more often by people paying specifically for that content. It’s a refreshingly simple model. So enjoy this brief period of podcasting’s adolescence while it lasts, and be glad that for now we only have the occasional Zip Recruiter live reads to fast forward through.

True crime writing, long-form reporting, documentaries, and radio documentaries have all existed for a long time. But the serialized podcast format is creating all sorts of new opportunities for this brand of reporting and allowing it to be more in-depth than ever before. New stories are being told in unique ways, and — best of all — they’re being heard.

Audio is a more passive medium, in that it doesn’t require your full attention, and you can experience it while you do something else, like drive a car or clean your doll collection. This ability to be experienced on less than full engagement paradoxically makes podcasts more intimate. It’s content you can take with you wherever you go, keeping you company on your commute or in your desperate attempt to tune out coworkers. This quality also allows for more in-depth, more detailed reporting. Storytellers can tell longer-form narratives, some of these lasting up to 10 hours, without worrying that they’re boring people.*

*Though it’s worth mentioning: just because you can make a 10-hour podcast doesn’t always mean you should.

At the close of 2018, we’re seeing incredible advocacy journalism being done in podcasts. Many of these series offer top-notch entertainment, but they’re also Important. I don’t expect it will always be this way. Here are some of my hopes for the medium going forward:

1. Let audio be audio.

One of the most obnoxious trends in podcasts right now is the push to turn podcasts into “soundscapes.” Some shows do it better than others, and there are certainly some soundscape-y pods on this list, but the reason the medium is popular in the first place is that there is a simple power and pleasure in listening to a single human voice. It’s fine for a podcast to be just that. So many podcasts are starting to add unnecessary sound effects, pointless music, and conspicuous edits that I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode where Homer learns to edit video. “You know there are other transitions besides a star wipe, right?”

It’s crass enough that we have to listen to your live reads about mattresses in the middle of the story of someone’s wife’s murder, don’t double down by adding some god awful slowed-down cover to “set the mood.” If the story alone isn’t sufficient to set the mood, fix the story.

2. Understand the responsibility

A good investigative podcast can help solve a murder or get someone wrongly convicted out of prison. A bad one can get an innocent person fired, run out of town, etc., and solely because he seemed like he might be the killer for half an episode. Maybe finish running down a lead before you post it, just in case. As Jon Ronson put it, “don’t use narrative dead ends for dramatic tension.”

3. Don’t rush it

Closely related to number two. Sometimes a story takes a few years to report. That’s a long time! Not every reporter or outlet can afford to pursue a story for that long, and not every story has closure. We’re blessed to have so many reporters willing to spend years working the same story. But as the medium becomes more lucrative, it’s easy to imagine people throwing bigger money at shows and demanding faster results. That could be disastrous.

4. Use your damned voice

Maybe it’s because so many of the best podcasts are coming from public radio right now and these criticisms have probably all been made before in that context, but… what is it with hosts who talk like they’re trying not to wake a baby in the next room? It’s an epidemic in podcasting. There’s nothing more infuriating than listening to a host try to mimic broad, newscaster-y inflections while speaking in a quavery half-whisper. You don’t have to be the morning zoo guys, but maybe find a happy medium?

PART I: Honorable Mention

Reply All is a perennial favorite, and the only reason it’s not higher is that I’m not sure it quite fits the category. Generally, it’s a nice little breakdown of weird niches of the internet, but their recent deep dive about the Foxconn factory coming to Wisconsin was one of the best podcasts of the year. Basically, imagine the monorail episode of the Simpsons, only the Simpsons lose their house at the end.

Dan Carlin is kind of the OG of non-fiction podcasting, and Hardcore History was one of the first on my favorites list. I don’t know that it necessarily fits this category, but it still earns its spot in my favorites. Dan Carlin sounds exactly like a rightwing radio guy and has that same skill of being able to just talk for four hours at a clip with no one else in the room, only he’s actually thoughtful and good. He’s like a Bizarro World Rush Limbaugh.

Some of the podcasts at the top of this list are about Sheriff’s departments with outsize power. Repeat, about police-involved shootings in LA county, proves that isn’t just something that happens in the past or in small towns in the South.

Offshore is a series out of Hawaii, telling stories specific to that part of the world, which manages to be simultaneously relevant and escapist. Everything is a little strange and mysterious out in the Pacific, and the most recent season, about illegal adoptions in the Marshall Islands, is a fascinating slice of life in a little-thought-of corner of the world, plus a compelling mystery solved all rolled into one.

PART II: The Top Ten

What was that I said about #CultContent? Cults and commerce combine in The Dream, which explores the history of multi-level marketing and how it came to be so intertwined with the government. It seems to be a peculiarly American disease. MLMs have always had outsize influence at the government level, but now we actually have MLM heirs running branches of government. “Grifter” isn’t just a clever insult when it comes to the Trump administration. That makes The Dream a must-listen, and Jane Marie makes it fun, with an unapologetically conversational style.

#CultContent strikes again! When it happened, the Cliven Bundy story was just too weird and esoteric, with too many side quests, to understand entirely. It really took a podcast to tell the full story and NPR and Longreads found the niche.

Not to poo poo the Trump-Russia investigation or anything with the potential to get him out of office, but every time I read about meetings with “operatives” and arcane violations of campaign finance rules my eyes glaze over a little bit. I’m much more interested in what feels like the bigger story: that Trump is essentially a scam artist who built his entire career on fraud (allegedly, I guess). From his $413 million inheritance to his seemingly daily violations of the emoluments clause, Trump, Inc. delves into the details. There are probably too many bonus episodes, but it’s all the kind of stuff everyone should know.

I know sports documentaries arguably aren’t “important” in the same way as exposés about the failings in the criminal justice system, but I still can’t get enough. And to be fair, this series from Wondery and the Boston Globe about former Patriot/murderer Aaron Hernandez did have plenty about the criminal justice system as well. If you can get past Bob Hohler’s odd accent (why is white trash New England so much easier to listen to than newscaster New England? Same with Australian) there’s a new revelation about Aaron Hernandez in almost every episode.

Another Wondery show, Dr. Death is the spiritual sequel to Dirty John, following a sociopathic spinal surgeon who managed to maim or kill almost everyone he operated on. While its subject, Christopher Duntsch, is perhaps less a deliciously mundane psychopath than John Meehan, what the sequel loses in lurid bingeability it gains in relevance — an actual indictment of the way the medical system works, rather than an isolated story of one crazy villain. Like all Wondery shows, the soundscape editing is a bit much at times, and with some truly ill-fitting music (to say nothing of the jarring ad reads), but the thorough, thoughtful reporting itself, from Laura Beil, more than makes up for it.

Bear Brook, from New Hampshire Public Radio, delves into a cold case that began with the discovery of two bodies in a 55-gallon drum in the woods in 1985, and ends up unmasking a serial killer before it’s finished. Exploring cold cases has been a staple of true crime shows and podcasts as long as they’ve been around, but what makes Bear Brook so special is the science reporting. It’s a fascinating depiction of just how difficult it can be to identify bodies and the technological advances that make new revelations possible. It’s also unique in that it finds actual answers to the questions it asks about a 35-year-old case (not all of these kinds of shows offer them, and in many cases it’s out of the reporters’ hands).

Caliphate reporter Rukmini Callimachi is the journalism equivalent of Alex Honnold from Free Solo, the kind of person whose work is both incredible to watch and seems almost suicidally brave. In Caliphate, Callimachi combs recently destroyed ISIS hangouts to gather information about how it actually works and meets with a former recruit, a seemingly normal kid from Canada. If nothing else, it will drive home just how similar ISIS recruits are to the alt-right incel members who purport to hate them.

Last season’s Crime Town, from reporters Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier (who also worked on HBO’s The Jinx), profiled corruption in Providence Rhode Island. The latest season is about Detroit, and while it may not have a character quite as compelling as former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci or accents as fun as Rhode Island ones (I got a few angry emails for saying Michigan accents are terrible a few months back but I stand by it), it does have murderous policemen and Gil Hill as a main character, who also happened to play Axel Foley’s boss in Beverly Hills Cop. Any show that uses a Death song as its theme is okay by me.

Much like “the CSI effect” conditioned us all to believe that handsome lab techs with irrefutable DNA evidence would solve all crime, we tend to believe exonerating DNA evidence is a get-out-of-jail card, the end of an injustice story, after which everyone lives happily ever after. Murderville, from The Intercept, about a 1998 murder at a Taco Bell in Adel, Georgia, shows just how much that isn’t true. Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith (whose voice is so scratchy it sounds painful) report this infuriating story, which takes prosecutorial incompetence and small-town corruption to new levels.

It almost feels hack to put Serial at the top of a podcast “best of” list, but in this case the conventional wisdom is absolutely true, and Sarah Koenig earns all the praise she gets. The traditional way of doing an investigative podcast series about the criminal justice system was to document its greatest anomaly, its “worst” injustice, where an obviously innocent man or women sits behind bars.

The problem with that kind of reporting is that it can too easy for people to assume those cases aren’t proof of dysfunction but genuine outliers. In season three, Serial moves from One Crazy Case to documenting a series of cases in the Cleveland area. In so doing, it has evolved to depict average, everyday injustice — the kind it’s impossible to see as anomalous. There’s the guy who’s in jail for the murder he didn’t commit, sure, but what about all the people who take a plea over the bar fight they didn’t start or the possession charge based on an illegal search? And end up in the same predatory probation system?

Serial season three doesn’t just depict injustice, it explains how injustice happens, which makes it some of the most valuable reporting around. It also has a reporter with an inexplicable British accent who can’t pronounce TH sounds, which is kind of the most public radio thing ever, isn’t it?

Remember everything I said about Serial evolving from anomalous to everyday injustice? Well In The Dark season two is the opposite of that, reporting the story of just one case, Curtis Flowers, a guy who has spent the past 21 years in jail for a quadruple murder at a furniture store in Mississippi. What makes the Curtis Flowers story so compelling is the sheer magnitude of the injustice at stake.

In The Dark somehow always manages to combine incredible reporting with unbelievable serendipity (perhaps if you do enough of the former it creates the appearance of the latter?). In season one, the 30-year-old cold case that reporter Madeleine Baran profiled — the stranger danger kidnapping and murder of Jacob Wetterling — happened to be solved just weeks before the first episodes were set to be released. In season two, the Mississippi Supreme Court agreed to hear the Flowers case just months after season two released its (original) final episode.

In combining dogged advocacy journalism with smart but inconspicuous production values, In The Dark is the gold standard of the investigative podcast.

You didn’t think I was going to get to the end of this list without mentioning my own podcast, did you? What a waste of SEO that would be. No, the Frotcast isn’t as good as any of the podcasts mentioned, and certainly not as important. Every week we investigate movies and pop culture and combine bad jokes with almost-as-bad production values. It would be a true crime not to listen.

The most anticipated challenge of Top Chef is “restaurant wars,” and this season it came early (not that there’s anything wrong with that). As one contestant noted, restaurant wars usually doesn’t happen until week eight! That’s how you know this show has been on a long time: the contestants are so well versed in how it works that they can “well actually” the timing of a challenge.

Early restaurant wars meant a few things — three teams instead of two, a two-part episode, and no Graham Elliot in this one, which meant I didn’t throw things at the TV, but also I can’t just post a screencap of his silly outfit in my recap for easy dunks. This episode also had a double elimination. Wait, scratch that, it teased a double elimination, but it won’t actually happen until the next episode, because this one was a To Be Continued. They still have these? Sheesh. Delay my gratification?! What is this, the 30s?

The lack of a proper ending means these rankings are less scientific than usual (and they’re usually incredibly scientific). Top Chef‘s editors are certainly setting a few contestants up as the villains, incompetents, and nincompoops, but the question is, are these storylines background or just fodder for big exciting twists? Are they serving us confirmation or surprise? Time will tell, folks, and I for one can’t wait.

The elimination challenge left unfinished, but there was a Quickfire challenge based on the amuse bouche. “Amuse bouche” is, of course, a French phrase meaning “fun mouth” — which was also your mom’s nickname in junior high. It refers to a bite-sized dish that teases the palate and gets you all horned up to shove more food in your dumb face. Imagine the chips and salsa you get at a Mexican restaurant, only you only get one chip with a dollop of salsa on it and the food costs ten times more. ¡Cuisine!

Michelle has gotten about five minutes combined screen time this season (when we learned that her grandmother was a drug shaman) and she managed to stay in the middle of the pack in every single challenge until this one. But she amused many a bouche with her tiny take on halibut ceviche. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, Top Chef judges f*cking love a crudo. Crudo is the reverse risotto.

It helps her ranking that Michelle is on a team that doesn’t look like it’s going to lose this restaurant wars (with Sara as front of house manager) and the agnolotti that she was working on looked pretty good. “Those are good looking agnolotti,” said Tom Colicchio, and you know that dude would just love to jump on you for sub-par agnolotti. Tom Colicchio lives to mansplain stuffed pasta, so they must’ve been good. Therefore, Michelle is my slight favorite to win this next challenge. Maybe we’ll even learn something about her.

2. (+1) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

Eric has given off an air of class president this whole time and cooked food that consistently made me say “oooh that looks good” to the TV while sitting alone in my apartment (it’s a thing I do). Nonetheless, he hadn’t landed a top finish until this week’s quickfire, when a tiny curry put him in the top three. I feel vindicated. In the elimination challenge, he got a little grief from Adrienne (Hollow Bones) for making Eddie reduce his sauce, the editors seemingly setting him up as the team underachiever, but if we take the editors’ choices at face value, his team is probably going to win anyway. He and Adrienne have a Tracy Flick-Paul Metzler kind of a thing going on, if Tracy Flick was more of a granola NPR lady.

We didn’t get as many shots of Eddie sweating over a decision or looking like he was going to commit suicide over a broken emulsion this week, and, having to once again shop with a budget for a challenge, he even got to redeem his much-discussed Overpriced Lamb Debacle from episode two (guys, stop trying to make this “Moneybags” nickname happen, mine are much better). He seems calm (for Eddie), he’s on a team that looks like a favorite, and he said he was making a strip steak and a crudo.

I’m calling him a favorite based on the crudo alone.

4. (+9) Brandon Rosen — AKA: Heydrich. AKA: Biff. AKA: Shhhh.

Bravo

Brandon is really pissing me off, not doing anything overtly douchey for the past two episodes and nearly winning the quickfire for his bouche amusing mini chowder (something something your mom). Own your brand, Brandon! Be more terrible! Coming up with jokes for this every week is hard enough. Anyway, the editors are clearly setting Brandon up as a favorite this episode, making him look like a real helpful guy and offering a whole vignette where Kelsey gossips to her teammates that Brandon’s team should just listen to Brandon because Brandon is so smart. I feel like only a person from Alabama could be this impressed by Brandon’s intellect.

One caveat to Brandon’s high ranking is that he’s apparently making a “soy milk custard” in the elimination challenge which, and I say this as someone who absolutely isn’t a corny vegan hater, sounds like complete and utter ass. It sounds like one of those high risk/low reward dishes that at best will turn out surprisingly tolerable. It’s like when the waiter takes your order without writing it down. No one is impressed at your memory trick, dude, the best possible outcome is that you don’t fuck up something most of us assumed was pretty easy to begin with so maybe just write it down there, okay Capitan?

Anyway, a soy custard is exactly like that.

5. (-1) Sara Bradley — AKA: Party Mom. AKA: G-Squared

Bravo

Party Mom won some plaudits for her shrimp and sunchoke dish in the quickfire but didn’t make the top three. Then her team elected her Front of House manager, which could really go either way. Electing the life of the party as your party planner, they either lead by example and everyone has a blast or they chug all the beer before the girls get there and pass out in the bathtub. Time will tell with Party Mom.

Sara is on the team that’s clearly getting the least screen time, getting edged out by over-involved Front of the House manager Brian and under-involved FOH manager Nini. It’s hard to say what that means just yet, but if anyone goes home from Sara’s team my money’s on Pablo.

6. (+6) AKA: The Hair. AKA: Hipster Joe Flamm. AKA: Son of Shhh.

Bravo

This week Brian revealed that he used to be in an indie band before he bottomed out, got sober, and found food, which has to be the least surprising revelation in the history of this show. Let us remember that in episode one I described his hairstyle as “I used to sing in a hardcore band before I went back to grad school.”

Anyway, Brian finished last episode at the bottom, having come to Top Chef without any dessert experience. This week he stayed out of the bottom in the Quickfire, got elected FOH manager for restaurant wars, and then spent all night writing a “service manual” for his waitstaff. The editors are clearly setting him up to look like the teacher’s pet, showing up on time with his homework all finished, so we’ll see how it plays out. Naturally, I’ll be rooting for the team who decided to drink wine in the bathtub.

7. (+2) Adrienne Wright — AKA: NPR. AKA: Dangles. AKA: Hollow Bones.

Bravo

Adrienne had the most on-brand moment of any competitor this week, when she had the wait staff “pass around the service manual, with each of you reading one paragraph out loud.”

Born to be a kindergarten teacher, this one. Adrienne landed on the bottom of this week’s quickfire, but she’s on the team that the editors seem to be setting up for victory in the elimination, so who knows. Maybe she’ll win and celebrate by finger painting a new smock dress.

8. (-6). David Viana — AKA: Maybe. AKA: Superfan.

Bravo

Mousy lil David won (almost?) every quickfire until this one, which landed him in the bottom three. I don’t know how much you can read into that one though, not many people can make stuffed pasta in 20 minutes like David attempted to. Thank God Tom wasn’t judging that one, he would’ve flipped over a table. Hubris was the theme of the episode, with David’s superteam assuming they were going to skate through restaurant wars on talent alone and finishing the episode looking like they were on the verge of imploding. That said, of the four chefs on his team, David seems like the least likely to go home. I don’t assume this setback will last long.

9. (-8) Nini Nguyen — AKA: Brooklyn. AKA: Bad Cop.

Bravo

Coming off two straight wins, Nini is clearly being set up as the fall guy this time around, the AWOL FOH manager, fiddling with her ice cream while her wait staff stands around like cattle waiting to be herded. OH GOD, WHAT DO WE DO?? This is why you don’t drink wine in the bathtub when you should be doing your homework, Nini. God, I hope Nini’s team wins. The entire fantasy of the service industry for desk-bound schmucks like me is that you can spend the entire time getting drunk and having fun. Do not ruin this for me, Top Chef!

10. (+1) Pablo Lamon — AKA: One Plug. AKA: Smooth Fabio. AKA: Brint.

Bravo

The editors broke a sweat trying to position Smooth Fabio as… stubborn (?) this week, though I don’t know how much it paid off. Pablo spent basically the entire time testing food on Brandon who gave him different variations on Randy Jackson’s “hmmm, a little pitchy, dog.”

Wasn’t the theme of this entire episode trusting yourself? Listen to your ear plug, Pablo! Oye, cook Padma some feesh! If Pablo’s team loses over bad food, my money is on Pablo getting sent home.

Kelsey, who — as you’ll remember from the first episode — promised to surprise us by not cooking Southern food, this week cooked a shrimp and grits hush puppy in the quickfire. That turned out to be too big for an amuse bouche and it dropped her into the bottom three. Kelsey, you’re so on brand and you don’t even know it.

Kelsey gloated along with her superteam favorites, getting drunk on wine and their own hubris, but now it’s looking like it’s all about to fall apart. If Kelsey got sent home I would miss her most of all, but it would be a just punishment for telling someone that they should listen to Brandon.

This was the week Justin the chill fedora guy finally lost his chill. First Justin got mad at Nini for not doing enough prep work and pulled her away from training the wait staff, then when she was doing prep work he got mad at her for not training the staff. Which one is it, Justin! Sheesh, Cheech sure gets crabby without his weed. Or maybe it’s because the normally fedora’d Justin was wearing a sweatband instead of a fedora this week. Is it a coincidence that he lost his chill and his fedora at the same time? Perhaps he needs the Fedora of Ultimate Chill to properly center him in the mindful mindset (Justin seems like a guy who uses the word “mindful,” doesn’t he?). Or maybe the sports headband turned him all competitive. I could see Justin’s mood being decided entirely by headwear, like a Lego man.

Anyway, I put him last because he seemed the maddest, and the mad person on the worst team usually gets into a pissing contest at judges table that ends in them getting sent home.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

There comes a time in every film critic’s life when he must relinquish childish notions about the impossibility of quantifying art and submit to the algorithms. This we know as “year-end list” season. In my brain I know that ranking movies is super lame, and people can experience the same films under different circumstances producing different reactions and that’s okay, but in my heart I know that my opinions are objectively the correct ones and that I must rage, rage against the other clowns on the internet.

This is my year-end best-of list. There are many like it but this one is mine. Without my year-end best-of list, I am nothing. Without me, my year-end best-of list is nothing.

10. (tie) Mission Impossible: Fallout, Paddington 2, Annihilation

Paramount Pictures

It’s number 10 and I’m already cheating. You didn’t think I’d really be able to limit this list to just 10, did you? Rules are for science writers, baby. In any case, I found these films surprising and delightful enough to warrant mention.

I’ve never wholeheartedly loved a Mission Impossible movie before Fallout, but this one put the whole franchise over the top, mainly by dispensing with the pretense that the plot is especially important or the story about anything but over-the-top spectacle in Mission Impossible movies. To know thyself is truly a gift. In that sense Fallout is the Furious 7 of this franchise. Fallout gave us Tom Cruise piloting all manner of conveyance (cars! trucks! boats! helicopters!) while platonically seducing women all across the globe (they love his pumpin’ lil’ legs!) and of course, running so hard it looked like his limbs might fly off. Tom Cruise is so committed you can allow yourself to forget that his religion has been accused of keeping slaves. That’s quite a feat.

Oh, and there was Henry Cavill in a sweet mustache.

Paramount

Is it just me or are spy movies in which Henry Cavill appears the best spy movies? Every time I see him in a movie I think how handsome he is and try to copy his facial hair and quickly realize I can’t pull it off. Anyway, the helicopter sequence at the end of Fallout is one of the best blockbuster action sequences ever filmed.

Paddington 2 is the movie Mary Poppins Returns wanted to be. I never would’ve expected it from a creepy-eyed CGI bear, but Paul King and Simon Farnaby gave us Paddington as an avatar of modern Britishness — where a kind of reserved politeness and fusty rectitude are the ultimate ideals. Call that revisionist or modernized, it’s a nice thought in any case. Hugh Grant’s role as a famous thespian disgraced into doing dog food commercials is his best ever (and deserves serious awards consideration) and that’s in a movie that also includes Brendan Gleason, Hugh Bonneville, and Sally Hawkins. It would’ve been hard to have a more pleasant time in a movie this year.

If Paddington 2 and Fallout were the best of the broad multiplex offerings, Annihilation was a psychological sci-fi horror film so ineffable and metaphysical that it’s hard to believe it even got made. Alex Garland took a book that seemed impossible to film and turned it into a movie that’s almost impossible to describe. Also, there was a skull bear made of screams. Now that’s how you do introspection.

9. Eighth Grade

A24

A lot of performances get called “brave” every year and usually they’re just the kind of roles you expect from famous actresses who dress down for easy accolades. Destroyer had a pretty good script and direction, but Nicole Kidman was essentially a holocaust propaganda cartoon caricature of a non-beautiful person. “This is what you gross slobs look like, isn’t it? Did I get the liver spots right?” You know that speech in Kill Bill 2 where Bill is talking about how Superman’s Clark Kent outfit is basically how Superman views all humans? There’s an awards movie version of that.

I digress, but in any case, Elsie Fisher, channeling her most awkward incarnation and preserving it forever in Eighth Grade, actually was brave. It was also an amazing work for a first time director. Eighth Grade had all the things you’d expect in a movie about an eighth-grader — painful awkwardness, social faux pas, embarrassing parents, tragic crushes — but Bo Burnham made music with them. In his hands, those adolescent touchstones felt not banal or well worn but iconic, anthemic. Also important, Burnham gave his “arthouse” movie an edge, unafraid to occasionally go scat when the situation warranted it (these are eighth graders after all). In 2019, Lord grant us more movies that are smart without being overly mannered. “Taste” means pushing the boundaries a little bit.

8. Roma

Netflix

Roma is showing up on everyone’s best-of list, and for good reason: every scene feels like the filmmaking equivalent of nailing a quadruple axel (yeah I do figure skating metaphors now, deal with it). Almost every scene is a long-take tracking shot as carefully choreographed as the D-Day landing, that the actors nonetheless have to perform while maintaining the facade of social realism (even Busby Berkeley didn’t have that requirement).

I honestly didn’t want to add to Roma‘s critical acclaim, simply because it seems so arthouse conventional on the surface — it’s in black and white, it’s opening just in time for maximum awards consideration, and most of the promo images involve sad but proud people looking life-affirmingly at each other on a beach somewhere. I wanted to hate it, truly, and its “climactic” beach scene is the weakest part. But it just couldn’t be denied. The entire subplot with Cleo’s naked karate boyfriend culminating in a street riot scene is unforgettable. See it, I promise.

7. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot

Amazon

I’m baffled as to why Gus Van Sant’s biopic of vulgar, disabled cartoonist John Callahan played by Joaquin Phoenix isn’t getting more love this awards/year-end list season. Is it because it hit limited release at the height of summer blockbuster season? Was it too expected?

Whatever the case, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is a superior film to that other Joaquin Phoenix movie that’s on everyone’s awards list (You Were Never Really Here), which, when you strip away the cool visuals, has a plot that wouldn’t fly on Law & Order SVU (which is a credit to Lynne Ramsay’s directing, but the fact remains that it’s essentially a collection of art tricks). Meanwhile, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is Van Sant’s best in a long time, with huge performances by Phoenix, a big stretch for Jonah Hill (as flamboyant 12-step hero Donnie Green) that totally pays off, and solid supporting work from Jack Black and the lesser-known actors who populate Callahan’s alcoholics anonymous classes. I’m shocked Jonah Hill isn’t in the awards conversation for this one this year.

Like Spike Lee, Gus Van Sant seems to be at his best when he’s doing straightforward period pieces, and practically everything he does works in this one.

6. Hereditary

A24

How do you not love a horror movie where Satan wins at the end (spoiler alert, I guess)? There aren’t many movies where a character gets graphically decapitated and it isn’t even the most memorable scene of the movie. Hereditary feels like a response to everyone who said those other critically acclaimed horror movies (It Follows,The Babadook, etc.) weren’t scary enough. Normie America still hates this one, but it certainly wasn’t because it wasn’t scary.

5. The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs

Netflix

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (original review) is all of the Coen Brothers’ storytelling tics and obsessions squeezed into a single anthology. It takes many of the themes they’ve always explored and positions them as central to a kind of collective American consciousness — as well as indulging their passions for circular, archaic vernacular (he’s bona fide) and possibly symbolic animal characters.

The key to understanding Buster Scruggs is realizing that it’s a collection of campfire stories. Why campfire stories? Because they tell us something about the culture that produces them. These stories, frequently about death and mortality (those other Coen obsessions), echo throughout the generations with each new one putting their own spin it. It’s sort of like the folkloric equivalent of The Aristocrats joke (folk music also features prominently, as it usually does in Coen movies).

Why stories of the frontier? Because the frontier is uniquely American, or we like to think of it as such. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs explores the brutality of expansion, existing at the place where our most absurd dreams of the frontier collide with their crudest realities. Hilariously so, and with plenty of magical cats (metaphorically speaking). If you want to understand the Coen Brothers, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a great place to start.

4. If Beale Street Could Talk

ANNAPURNA

If no one shoots a long take tracking shot like Alfonso Cuarón, no one does cinematic portraiture like Barry Jenkins. The characters in If Beale Street Could Talk are all so luminous and radiant you can’t help but fall in love with them. That’s nothing new if you’ve seen Moonlight, but where Moonlight was meditative, Beale Street has ensemble scenes of family strife that absolutely crackle, with verbal missiles lobbed back and forth in such a way that it feels almost like the deluxe gourmet version of Tyler Perry. All the fireworks with none of the cheating to get there. On the surface, Beale Street tells a sad story, but it’s delivered so achingly, so soothingly that you can’t help but want to live in it. Like the title, it really is a blues song. No movie in 2018 felt as “lived in” as If Beale Street Could Talk.

3. Border

Neon/Fantastic Fest

It’s hard to say much about Border without spoiling one of the most singularly unique moviegoing experiences of the year, but suffice it to say that Border, from director Ali Abbasi and writer Isabella Eklof (same team behind Let The Right One In) makes the fantastic something you can touch, taste, and feel in a way few movies do. It’s also hard to combine “gross” and “humane” portrayals in the same movie, but Abbasi pulls it off, positing a hidden world beneath the visible that manages to be both “humane” and a critique of humanity for all the things we take for granted. I’ve never been so simultaneously revolted, heartwarmed, and turned on.

2. The Favourite

Fox Searchlight

Nothing more vividly illustrates the problems of hereditary wealth and power like the lives of our cloistered, inbred European monarchs of yesteryear. And yet this properly derisive view of aristocracy is so often hamstrung by our tendency to turn cinematic queens into vehicles for female empowerment. Surely we deserved a better take on queens than “yaas queen?” Yorgos Lanthimos (with writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara) finally gave it to us in The Favourite, the perfect period piece for a world beset by failchildren.

One result is a movie owned entirely by its female protagonists — Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz. So many period pieces end up bloodless and antiseptic, denying us the shit-covered streets, the cum covered sheets, the mole-covered fops to make the past truly come alive. The Favourite was the antidote to that, not to mention probably the funniest movie of the year.

1. Sorry To Bother You

annapurna

Picking favorites between the top four or five on this list is splitting hairs to some degree, but no movie this year felt so much like a coming out party for an exciting new voice. You didn’t have to like Sorry To Bother You as much as I did to think “I can’t wait to see more movies from this guy.”

It’s rare to see a movie as political as Sorry To Bother You that’s also fun (Vice being a notable counterexample). Above all, Sorry To Bother You felt unconstrained by the normal rules — of narrative, of politeness, of accepted political discourse. Also, Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson are future Oscar winners, and Sorry To Bother You gave Terry Crews his best role yet. In his debut feature, Boots Riley proved important movies don’t have to be boring.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

]]>https://uproxx.com/movies/top-10-movies-2018-mancini/feed/36movies-grid-uproxx.jpg‘The Favourite’ Is The Perfect Period Piece For A World Beset By Failchildrenhttps://uproxx.com/movies/the-favourite-review/
https://uproxx.com/movies/the-favourite-review/#commentsFri, 21 Dec 2018 19:41:49 +0000http://uproxx.com/?p=401662759

Fox Searchlight

From The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos and writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara comes The Favourite, at long last a movie about kings and queens and regal ladies that doesn’t venerate the monarchy. It feels like the period piece I’ve always wanted.

Prolific British television actor Olivia Colman plays Queen Anne, the gout-addled ruler of early 18th century Great Britain who’s so caught up in her 17 rabbits (one for every child she birthed stillborn or who died in infancy) that she can’t remember if there’s a war on. Rachel Weisz plays Lady Marlborough, the queen’s “favourite” and the real political operator at court. How does one become the queen’s favorite? Mostly by pleasuring her in the bed chamber (which could mean just rubbing her gouty legs or actual genital stimulation) and humoring her latest weird whim, like gorging fine cheeses or racing fancy ducks.

As Columbia professor Julie Crawford explained to The Cut, “There wasn’t a radical separation between what we recognize as sexual intimacy and the other kinds of bodily intimacy with which people lived at the time, particularly for elite people, who had women who literally undressed them and washed their vaginas.”

Into this mix comes Abigail, played by Emma Stone, a fallen noblewoman and cousin of Lady Marlborough who has come to court to find a job and maybe redeem her family name. On the way there she shares a carriage ride with a soldier who stares at her while he tugs himself under his pants (the year’s best IMDB credit), and when she goes to get out she falls face-first into the muck trying to avoid his grope. “This mud stinks,” she says to a servant boy at court. To which he replies matter of factly, “They shit in the streets here.”

That’s sort of The Favourite in a nutshell, brutally accurate to the nitty-gritty of life in the early 18th century with dialogue made modern enough to understand and glib enough to be consistently hilarious.

It’s hard to convey just how refreshing this is. For a long time the only strong female character Hollywood screenwriters could think to write were actual queens. And so the salient factor for most period pieces, basically all the way up to now, was a famous actress acting wickedly imperious. The goal was apparently for audiences to shout “yaaas queen!” at an actual queen, which is pretty much the most neoliberal horseshit ever. Monarchs were “powerful,” sure, and Elizabeth I in particular certainly deserves credit for being both a pioneer and a savvy operator, but almost by definition European royalty mainly consisted of the inbred failchildren of the rich.

The Favourite is the perfect period piece for a world beset by failchildren. Consider: the last two Supreme Court appointees (appointed for life!) came from the same tony prep school, and the current Secretary of Education is the heir to an auto parts fortune who married the heir to a multi-level marketing scam. Failchildren are everywhere, still with outsized influence over our daily lives.

When Abigail first comes to court she’s thrown in with the help — the herb choppers, floor scrubbers, and royal chamber pot cleaners, the folks who have to clean the duck shit and procure the lobsters. She sleeps head to foot in a tiny room with 20 other people. Contrasting the claustrophobic life of the poor, Lanthimos shoots the doings of the queen and Lady Malborough — which includes frequent verbal jousts with outrageous fops in white face paint with huge drawn-on moles, like Harley, leader of the Whigs, played by Nicholas Hoult — in a wide-angle, fish-eye lens that’s a little distracting at first. But Lanthimos’s purpose is clear: the life of the rich was drafty and antiseptic, with out-of-touch nobles eating fussy cakes in cavernous rooms while making policy for common folk far, far away, whose lives they almost certainly didn’t have the imagination to understand.

Lanthimos treats this aristocracy with the absurdism it warrants, in all its powder-faced, macro-sleeved, doily wristed, duck-racing glory. This is the baroque era, of preposterously large wigs and gilded everything, which underscores the decadent silliness of the entire ruling class. It’s also amazing to look at, where essentially every outfit, especially the men’s, is its own Alice In Wonderland sight gag. The sleeves! They’re all proportioned like Lenny Kravitz’s macro scarf. “Does the duck have to be here?” an exasperated Marlborough asks the leader of the Tories, and owner of “the fastest duck in the city.”

Davis and McNamara play a little loose (historically) with the dialogue, but only for the clear purpose of properly conveying the era’s true ridiculousness. And I’m glad they did, what with creative vulgarities like Harley describing a friend as “quite cuntstruck” and Abigail relating being sold to “a balloon-shaped German with a thin cock.”

Portraying the queen as pathetic and out of touch rather than calculating and queenly for once (and Olivia Colman’s performance is magnificent) not only feels more accurate to a system of rule-by-ancestry, it also allows for so many more interesting female roles. Weisz and Emma Stone spewing diamond-sharp dialogue while trying to outflank each other for Colman’s affections is a symphony. “I like it when she puts her tongue inside of me!” snaps Colman.

In an era of period pics (Mary Queen Of Scots, Outlaw King, etc) that generally range from disappointing to mildly disappointing, The Favourite is truly outstanding. Finally, a movie that treats individual aristocrats as flesh-and-blood humans and the aristocratic class with the appropriate derision.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

This week on Top Chef we got a Christmas episode. Fitting for a show that airs five days before Christmas, but kind of funny when you think that they probably shot this in July. Top Chef usually acknowledges stuff like that, which I suppose they maybe tried to do by having Graham Elliot show up in a Hawaiian shirt. Only it didn’t really land because Graham Elliot looks like the kind of guy who sleeps in a Hawaiian shirt.

Bravo

Every week on these I promise myself I’m going to stop making fun of Graham Elliot, whose only real crime is dressing like he plays trombone in a Christian ska band, but then this week he dropped the line “Strawberry and fennel are homies, right? They love to hang out.”

Gee whiz, Graham! Look at my strawberry and fennel just hanging out, drinking root beer and doing calisthenics like a couple of best friends! Isn’t that just the thing about having friends? That it feels just like a bag of sand?

So, uh… moratorium on making fun of Graham will have to wait until next week, I guess.

Apparently, there was no building inspector on the premises because I’m pretty sure hair this high violates several codes. Richard Blais is one of those dudes who seems really nice but also you’re kind of like “tone it down, dude, no one is that nice.”

Brooke and Blais were brought in to judge a White Elephant challenge. Or at least, that’s what I always called it. According to contestant Brian (Hipster Joe Flamm), it’s apparently also known as a “Yankee Swap.” Anyway, it’s the thing where you give each other shitty gifts and then steal them from each other. In this case, those gifts were big boxes full of ingredients. Not enough people recognized “box” as the sexual euphemism it is, in my opinion. Someone check Padma’s temperature, normally she’d be all over this.

After the quickfire, Eric Ripert and his copious wrist beads arrived to judge a 3 am dessert challenge. Yet again multiple contestants arrived without any dessert experience. Come on, people! It’s like you’re not even reading my articles…

1. (+1) Nini Nguyen — AKA: Brooklyn. AKA: Bad Cop.

Bravo

It’s extremely close between Nini and David, but they’re the two clear favorites at this point. Nini almost won the quickfire with a weird cheese/fruit dip with apples, which felt like a high degree of difficulty. The judges always treat not having a protein like it’s a magic trick. Then she used her pastry background to own the dessert challenge with… uh… some kind of… lemon… bark?

Bravo

I don’t know, man, desserts are weird. Apparently, it was good!

Nini also got her own backstory package about doing Christmas with her brother two weeks before he died (don’t you dare make me cry watching god damned Top Chef). She also briefly channeled Padma in the Yankee Swap challenge, cooing “Eddie, how do you like my box?”

Which made Eddie, who last week described pregnancy as “a woman’s… uh… situation,” even sweatier than normal.

Bravo

Don’t think about Nini’s box, don’t think about Nini’s box…

All Nini has to do if they ever go head to head is bring up her box again and watch Eddie slip in his sweat puddle and throw his stew pot into the air.

2. (-1). David Viana — AKA: Maybe. AKA: Superfan.

Bravo

David opened this week’s episode by admitting his “man crush” on Richard Blais, which is the second time in as many weeks that David has had a “crush” on one of the judges. We get it, David, you’re virile. Hornier than a billy goat, this guy. By the way, don’t encourage Richard Blais, he’s already way too conscious of his own cuteness. Later David gushed “I’ve got Richard Blais’ fork!”

Okay, settle down, man, now it’s getting weird.

Anyway, David is shaking out as a clear favorite, winning the quickfire with a “leek carbonara.” Which was pretty creative (and again, no protein = magic trick). Nini beat him in the elimination challenge for the second week in a row, but it was a dessert challenge and she’s a former pastry chef. I think they’re neck and neck.

3. (+4) Eric Adjepong — AKA: Ghana. AKA: Sports.

Bravo

“Hey, guys, remember when I went to Ghana?”

YES, ERIC, WE REMEMBER ABOUT THE GHANA. Just kidding, Eric is probably the most likable person on this show and I will listen to all of his Ghana stories if he will be my friend.

I don’t think Eric has been in either the top or the bottom of any challenge yet, but I’m putting him number three because he’s the chef who most consistently makes food that looks really good. Almost everything he’s made had made me say “damn, that looks good” to the TV, which is a thing many well-adjusted people do.

This week Eric made some Ghanaian donuts called “bofrots.” I’ve never had one, but as always, I am here for all of your culture’s fried shit.

4. (even) Sara Bradley — AKA: Party Mom. AKA: G-Squared

Bravo

Party Mom revealed herself as the Christmas Jew this week, along with a backstory package about being the only Jew in Kentucky. She landed in the top three with some chopped liver and an egg fried in pork fat, which Padma said she would’ve been thrilled to eat at Passover. Hmm, I don’t know how much pork fat you’d be eating at Passover, Padma. I guess it’d have to be a Reform Passover.

Does the Top Chef prize package include a psychiatrist? Someone serve this dude a Xanax tartare, am I right?

Eddie opened the week still beating himself up over getting the other Philly chef eliminated because of his expensive lamb. Then he landed in the bottom three in the quickfire when he couldn’t handle Nini’s spicy box. After all that he probably would’ve swallowed his knives if he hadn’t put himself in the top three with his strawberry fennel crumble thingy. A Homie Strudel, as Graham might’ve called it.

“Are you ‘appy? You still luke stressed,” Eric Ripert asked when he announced Eddie’s top three finish.

Chill out, Eddie! Get you some Buddhist prayer beads like Eric Ripert! I’m envisioning a buddy-comedy road trip, where Eddie sits shotgun in Eric Ripert’s tiny convertible while Eric Ripert smokes very thin cigarettes and teaches Eddie to relax as they wind through the European countryside. Life, she eez beautiful, non? Then there would be a montage of busty women for some reason.

6. (even) Michelle Minori — AKA: Screen Time. AKA: Who?

Bravo

Is Michelle somehow getting less screen time? Has there ever been a Top Chef contestant who was on camera this little? She didn’t go home so I’ll infer that she cooked food this week.

Does anyone remember Spike from season four? He and Justin are basically the same guy, right? I need someone to validate this observation with the accuracy it deserves. Anyway, Justin managed to weasel his way through yet another episode without landing in the top three or bottom three of either challenge. He also made yet another dish involving bacon. Shocking that the guy with kind of a pander-y personality would be super into bacon. Epic, sir.

Notable Quote: “I can’t just wrap bacon around asparagus and put it on a plate and be like ‘here, Padma, eat it.’”

Kelsey, on her own dish: “Whatever, it’s stupid.”

Kelsey got bacon and asparagus in her box this week (heh), but apparently figured the obvious dish, bacon-wrapped asparagus, would be too basic to serve to Padma (come on Kelsey, embrace your brand) and made it with country ham instead. Which resulted in a classic mistake: calling her dish a thing and then not giving the judges that exact thing. If you bring up bacon-wrapped asparagus and then don’t give the judges exactly that, they’ll turn up their noses, like 5-year-olds who won’t eat the chicken tenders if they’re not shaped like dinosaurs. That landed her in the bottom three.

Kelsey and Nini formed the Smug Pastry Girl Club in the elimination challenge, but they both landed in the top three so you gotta respect it. The editors tried to set up a Big Drama scene by showing Sara open the oven right after Kelsey threatened to shank anyone if they opened her oven. But Kelsey improvised, and instead of fretting over fallen macaroons she just said “f*ck it, I’ll make biscottis.”

A lesson for us all. When life fells your macaroons, make biscottis.

9. (-2) Adrienne Wright — AKA: NPR. AKA: Dangles. AKA: Hollow Bones.

Bravo

Adrienne, who can’t open jars (hollow bones, like a bird) doubled down on the chunky earrings this week, with a pair of even more dangly octopus tentacle deals. Maybe God gave all her wrist strength to her earlobes? You ever get the feeling Adrienne paints her own pottery? She reminds me of a third-grade teacher who isn’t mad at me, just disappointed. I always think she’s going to make me write an apology letter over a fart.

Anyway, Adrienne once again made two dishes that went almost entirely un-commented upon.

10. (+1) Brandon Rosen — AKA: Heydrich. AKA: Biff. AKA: Shhhh.

Bravo

Just as I predicted, we finally got that backstory package about Brandon’s family owning a chocolate factory when he was growing up. Brandon tried to make a joke about eating all the ugly chocolates but Brandon’s jokes always come out sounding like he Google Translated them from the original Czech.

There was also a vignette about Brandon and Brian trying to accuse the other of using a flat iron on their hair (which was weirdly left unresolved). A flat iron? In the boy’s room?? My, how droll. Are you guys really trying to make fun of each other over this in 2018? 10 bucks says Graham Elliot has one of those retro perm dryers in his house.

Sadly for Brandon, his food seems to be getting worse as he grows gradually more tolerable.

11. (+2) Pablo Lamon — AKA: One Plug. AKA: Smooth Fabio. AKA: Brint.

Damn, despite looking like an early favorite in episode one, Smooth Fabio ignored the advice of his sentient ear plug once again. He botched his sucre whatever and Eric Ripert made him button two more of his shirt buttons in penance (that’s the Eurotrash equivalent of losing chevrons). Even worse, Blais and Brooke kind of bagged on Pablo’s rosti for being out of style. Daaamn, every time you bag on a smooth foreign man for being unfashionable an angel loses his cigarette.

Incidentally, I love a rosti.

12. (-2) AKA: The Hair. AKA: Hipster Joe Flamm.

Bravo

Brian made the classic mistake of showing up to Top Chef without a go-to dessert. Does the fact that he acknowledged it make it better somehow? As Brian put it, “I don’t know dessert, I cut meat!”

Yeah, yeah, stop overcompensating, Brian. Brian keeps trying to make hair his trademark personality trait. Looks aren’t personality, Brian, we already have one Graham. Anyway, Hipster Flamm has been in the bottom for a few challenges now but maybe there’ll be an artisanal butchery challenge or a challenge about matching a dish to your tattoos — then Brian can turn it around.

Kevin really earned his elimination this episode, grabbing five different kinds of flour for his ingredients in the quickfire and then serving up a ricotta cake with ricotta frosting (Dude, what is it with you and ricotta?) that, against all odds, managed to be too salty. Nothing screams “unforced error” like a dessert challenge with overseasoned ricotta.

Anyway, so long, Kevin, we hardly knew ye. The only upside of Kevin leaving so soon is that maybe people won’t notice that the Napoleon Dynamite jokes I’ve been making about him are basically the same as the ones I made about Carrie all last season. In my defense, I only know about three jokes.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can find his archive of reviews here.

This week we’ve got a bonus FREE EPISODE. Matt and I review Aquaman, which we were both surprised to find that we actually kind of liked a lot. Yes, there are spoilers, but probably not ones you would care hugely about. The movie doesn’t feel that spoil-able.

Areas of discussion include: how did our preconceived notions stack up to the finished film, and where did those preconceived notions come from? Did Aquaman just build the character around Jason Momoa’s actual personality? We also delve into Jason Momoa’s dopey charm, the big oafish jock you really want to befriend you for some reason. From there we get into the superhero movie’s obsession with monarchy, Willem Dafoe dressed like a geisha, water-driven technologies, and the aesthetic of excess.

Does Aquaman deserve a production design Oscar? And moreover, did DC finally stumble onto a tone that actually both works, and differentiates them from Marvel? And is a background making horror movies, like Aquaman director James Wan has, the best training for a superhero movie? If you want more movie reviews like this, subscribe to our Patreon, at Patreon.com/Frotcast. You’ll never be lonely when you have the Frotcast.